problems installing FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE on UltraSPARC IIe

[William Bulley]

According to David O'Brien <obrien at freebsd.org>:
> 
> > After more searching I saw someone's post about setting
> > hw.ata.atapi_dma=0 at boot time.
> 
> This is the correct fix for this.

Great.  Thanks!

> > At this point I searched the mailing lists for help and someone
> > suggested to replace the disk drive.  So, I replaced the disk drive (40
> > GB Western Digital) that came with the Sun Blade 150 with a brand new
> > 40 GB Western Digital drive and got the same thing.
> ..
> > ad0: FAILURE - WRITE_DMA timed out
> > ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=1
> > ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out
> > ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=0
> 
> The correct fix to this is to return to using the stock Sun drive.  They
> seemed to have tweaked the firmware of the disks they use to work with
> the POS ATA controller the Blade 100/150 uses.  When my Sun stock drive
> died, I went thru pure hell trying to find a disk that would work OK.
> 
> Of 5 40GB drives I tried, only an IBM IC35L040AVVN07 worked (has
> IC35L040AVVN07-0/VA2OAF0C firmware) works OK (no *_DMA timeouts) at ATA66.

Damn!  This is terrible news.

Thanks for the reply -- I really appreciate it and I can identify
with the "pure hell" part, grrrr....   :-)

I have swapped entire Sun Blades, I have swapped disk drives (twice) and
no joy.   :-(

All the Sun Blades we have here have Western Digital 40 GB IDE drives in
them.  We only have Western Digital 40 GB IDE as spares, obviously, duh...

I will have to see about getting an IBM IC35L040AVVN07 drive, sigh...

Thanks again.  (this is such a pain...)

Regards,

web...

--
William Bulley                     Email: web at umich.edu