Peculiar Boot Failure

[Tim Kientzle]

Here's an odd one:

If I disable the FLOPPY DISK in the BIOS
of my ASUS Terminator K7, then FreeBSD
(4.8-STABLE) will fail to find the HARD DISK
when it boots.

More details:
  Disable floppy in BIOS, try to boot machine.
  BIOS sees hard disk (primary master, 20GB Seagate)
  Boot loader loads
  Kernel loads and boots
  Kernel finds atapci0, ata0, ata1
  But, kernel never sees ad0 and boot freezes at
    end of device probe.  (Kernel issues no
    error message.)

I did this because I pulled out the floppy
cable (it was getting in the way of the fan).
Curiously, if I enable the floppy disk, then:
   BIOS reports error (no floppy found)
   Kernel boots normally, although it
     does probe and recognize the floppy drive
     (the floppy drive is physically disconnected!)

Apparently, floppy probing is more peculiar
than I had ever imagined....

Tim Kientzle