Hard Drive size not correctly being Detected on Dell 8100

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2003-Apr-04 21:12:22 -0700, so14k at so14k.com wrote:
>This is what is shown before sysinstall launches, with the stuff in
>parentheses as ASCII characters:
>ad0: dma limited to UDMA33, non-ATA66 cable or device
>ad0: 692MB <(smiley face black)C 5(smiley face white)0(heart)0(smiley face
>black)T at A 4!0> [1407/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33

I have exactly the same behaviour on a Compaq Armada 1592.  It seems
that the ATA disk probe will return total garbage if either the disk
or CD-ROM are accessed by the BIOS prior to starting FreeBSD.  (In my
case, I usually get ridiculuously high sizes - 43403MB on one recent
reboot).

I have posted about this problem several times over the past few years
without any result.  I've tried a couple of different 1592's with
exactly the same results so I don't believe it is faulty hardware.
There doesn't appear to be any problem other than the corrupt probe so
I just ignore it.

FWIW, the controller in the 1592 is:
atapci0 at pci0:20:0:      class=0x010180 card=0x0e1103f4 chip=0xd5681045 rev=0x30 hdr=0x00
    vendor   = 'OPTi Inc.'
    device   = '82C825 FireBridge II PCI EIDE Controller'
    class    = mass storage
    subclass = ATA

Peter