ATA problems with FreeBSD 5.4

[Matthias Buelow]

Joao Carlos Mendes Luis <jonny at jonny.eng.br> writes:

>kernel sends some messages, "ata0-master: failure - ATA_IDENTIFY timed 
>out", "ata0-master: failure - ATA_IDENTIFY timed out", and them no hard 
>disk is identified, so I cannot install the system.  If I boot from a 
>pre-installed hard disk, its even worse, after these message, I get a 

I've started experiencing the same here, occasionally on reboot, but
only after I have upgraded to 5.4-STABLE on June 21. Before, I haven't
seen that issue. In a similar situation to yours, Windows XP here has no
problems so I don't assume it's hardware related. (And, when it actually
boot, the problem doesn't seem occur anymore then while the system is
up.) I'm now hesitating to update other machines because of that, hope
it gets identified (and fixed) soon.

mkb.