problems installing FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE on UltraSPARC IIe

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 9:58 AM -0700 4/8/05, David O'Brien wrote:
>On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 01:47:53PM -0400, William Bulley wrote:
>
>>  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.

What model of ATA controller is it?

>Of 5 40GB drives I tried, only an IBM IC35L040AVVN07 worked (has
>IC35L040AVVN07-0/VA2OAF0C firmware) works OK (no *_DMA timeouts)
>at ATA66.

Did you test the other drives under solaris, or only under FreeBSD?

It might be that other hard drives will work better once the newest
ATA support is committed.  I went through all kinds of agony on 5.3
with multiple types of hard drives, on multiple kinds of SATA disk
controllers.  That agony included lots of "WRITE_DMA timed out" and
"READ_DMA timed out" messages.  And I had plenty of recommendations
that I needed to buy new hard disks.  I did do that, and I did switch
SATA controllers (trying three different controllers), but those
changes never really solved the problems, they only changed the nature
of the trouble I was seeing.

Things have been much better for me with the latest ATAng changes in
6.x-current, and we now have the even newer ATAmkIII changes (which I
have not tried yet).  Admittedly all of my headaches were in i386, not
sparc64, but it wouldn't surprise me if many of the same issues exist.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu