experience with 9.2-PRERELEASE

[John Reynolds]

On 7/18/2013 8:49 AM, Glen Barber wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 08:49:39PM -0700, John Reynolds wrote:
>> today. I will most definitely report back any findings. Thanks for
>> your reply!
>>
> John, in addition to suggestions/replies from others, can you also try
> the 10.0-CURRENT snapshot?  In particular, if your problem continues
> with a SATA drive, I am curious if the problem still exists in head/.
>
>      http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/
>
> Thanks.

Thanks to Glen and Steve and all those who replied to my initial 
posting. I am quite pleased after having been "figuratively gone" from 
(but still running) FreeBSD for coming up on 2 years (hey--when it's so 
rock solid, it's easy when you don't have to ask questions :) that i can 
come back to these lists and still find lots of people willing to help! 
You guys (and gals) are awesome!

Anyway, it seems I have solved my problems with this new hardware. There 
was really two issues I bumped into. After installing 9.1-R I saw this 
"timeout" problem to ahcich1 device and it would "hang" for about 5 
minutes then continue to boot. Then I tried 9.2-PRE but there the 
keyboard was not recognized and I kept getting infinite "ugen0.2: 
<Unknown> ..... (disconnected)" errors at the install screen. One person 
said to fiddle in the BIOS with the USB settings. I went into the BIOS 
and disabled "Intel USB 3.0 Mode" support (this is a very new 
motherboard with USB 3.0). That fixed the issue! For those curious about 
-current, I also tried to install that and it experienced the same USB 
problems until I disabled this 3.0 mode.

Once I got past that and installed 9.2-PRE again, I let it timeout again 
during boot. Then I looked at the dmesg output much more closely than I 
could have during the boot from DVD. It turns out that I only THOUGHT it 
was a timeout to the SSD. The Intel Series 520 SSD was NOT the issue. I 
was getting a timeout on ahcich1 which from the dmesg output was my DVD 
burner! The SSD was on ahcich5. The only difference here is that by 
sheer happenstance, I connected the SSD to the SATA port owned by the 
Intel Z87 (Lynx Point) controller. The DVD burner (which is probably 5 
years old) was hooked to ASRock's own "ASMedia ASM1061" controller. 
Apparently this controller doesn't play well with my older DVD burner. I 
switched ports and put both on the Intel controller and BOOM! Success! 
No timeouts, no funny business. Nothing. At this point i don't mind at 
all turning off the USB 3.0 mode because I have yet to actually see a 
3.0 device in the wild and I certainly won't own one anytime soon. :) 
.... so it's kind of a moot point. I'm sure the USB developers will see 
this problem and tackle it in time. I'm just thrilled to be booting on 
this new H/W!

Thanks again to all on the list that replied!

-Jr