FreeBSD 9.0 and (Kingspec) PATA drive ATA status errors. Drive unusable.

[Wajih Ahmed]

Thank you.  I'll try it out.  One question though.  How do i modify the
loader.conf on the usb image from which i am booting?  Is there somethign i
can change in the boot loader?  If this is RTFM kindly point me to it.



On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:45 AM, Ian Lepore
<freebsd at damnhippie.dyndns.org>wrote:

> On Sun, 2012-08-12 at 10:57 -0400, Wajih Ahmed wrote:
> > I have a Dell D420 laptop with the ZIF interface and uses a 1.8" PATA
> > drive.  I purchased a Kingspec 16GB SSD and installed it.  The BIOS
> > recogonizes the drive.  I am using the USB image to boot in verbose mode.
> > Upon boot the disk is recognized by FreeBSD 9.0 as follows (sorry for any
> > typos as i am reading this off the console):
> >
> > ada0 at ata0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0
> > ada0: <KingSpec KSD-ZF18.6-016MS 20120202> ATA-7 device
> > ada0: Serial number...
> > ada0: 100.0000MB/s transfers (UDMA5, PIO 512bytes)
> >
> > Then i see these errors
> >
> > (ada0:ata0:0:0:0): ATA status error
> > .....READ_DMA. ACB: c8 ....
> > .....CAM status: ATA status error
> > .....ATA status: 51 (DRDY SERV ERR), error: 84 (ICRC ABRT)
> > .....RES: 51 .....
> >
> >
> > As a result the disk is rendered unusable and i cannot write (partition)
> to
> > it.  I did test the drive with a linux boot disk and i was able to format
> > it.
> >
> > So my question is how can i make this drive work?  Do i need to pass
> > something to the kernel at boot to lower the speed of the drive.  Maybe
> to
> > UDMA66?  Any help will be really appreciated.
>
> Whenever I've seen ICRC errors, it has been caused by using a 40-wire
> cable at speeds faster than UDMA33 [1].  A potential fix is to force the
> mode in loader.conf:
>
>  hint.ata.0.mode="UDMA33"
>
> [1] I've also seen ICRC errors when there was no cable involved at all,
> such as with a surface-mount compact flash socket on a circuit board
> that has 50 pins spaced even closer together than a standard ata cable.
> I have no real proof that such closely-spaced pins cause the same kind
> of signal crosstalk as a 40-wire cable (they're close, but the length of
> the parallel wires is just a couple millimeters), but forcing the driver
> to UDMA33 or less always seems to fix the problem.
>
> -- Ian
>
>
>