Re: New day, new drive (Was 'going small')
From: Nikolas Britton (freebsd_at_nbritton.org)
Date: 04/24/04
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Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2004 22:33:10 -0500 To: jfm@blueyonder.co.uk
John Murphy wrote:
>I said "It's pointless to have such a nice new thing spoilt by
>a clunky old 1.3GByte disk drive which is so fat I can't get
>the lid on"
>
>She said "Well what about that one you said you could use?"
>
>"It's broken" I exclaimed.
>
>"You are supposed to be able to fix things" She continued...
>
>Anyway, the 40G Fujitsu arrived double bubble wrapped today so
>I went ahead and attempted to re-install 5.2.1 and got very
>similar errors to the ones I saw on the "broken" drive.
>
>The messages were the same but the locations were slightly
>different. I remembered something about creating a small
>FAT16 slice helping in such situations so I verified all the
>partitions/slices with Ranish Partition Manager[1] and then
>deleted all the partition records and created a 64K or so
>partition. No improvement.
>
>I'm doing this on my main (only) desktop therefore no resources
>available for consultation without using hers. No means of
>copying error messages[2] but it was something like:
>
>ad0:WARNING - write UDMA ICRC error
>ad0:FAILURE - write dma status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error 84
>ad0:FAILURE - write dma status=51<IRC,ABORTED>LBA=65 (to)
>ad0:FAILURE - write dma status=51<IRC,ABORTED>LBA=78
>and so on; each time four blocks possibly located at slice
>boundaries.
>
>My first thought was to write to questions@freebsd.org and CC
>hackers@ and a few others, but thought I'd better consult the
>documentation first ;) In Section 3 Open issues at:
>http://www.uk.freebsd.org/releases/5.2.1R/errata.html
>It says: (9 Jan 2004, updated 28 Feb 2004)
>In some cases, ATA devices may behave erratically, particularly
>SATA devices. Reported symptoms include command timeouts or
>missing interrupts. These problems appear to be timing-dependent,
>making them rather difficult to isolate. Workarounds include:
>
>* Turn off ATA DMA using the ``safe mode'' option of the
> bootloader or the hw.ata.ata_dma sysctl variable.
>* Use the host's BIOS setup options to put the ATA controller in
> its ``legacy mode'', if available.
>* Disable ACPI, for example using the ``safe mode'' option of the
> bootloader or using the hint.acpi.0.disabled kernel environment
> variable.
>
>So I tried the middle way first as the BIOS had certainly got the
>drive geometry wrong anyway - so I set it to the C/H/S fbsd fdisk &
>ranish had calculated. No change.
>
>The 5.2.1 boot process draws an ASCII beastie and gives several boot
>options triggerable by a number key press, so I pressed 3 for safe
>mode. Entered ufs:ad0s1a at the next prompt and installed without
>error. Getting somewhere at last, or so I thought, the first attempt
>to boot the installation was riddled with UDMA IRC errors.
>
>I let the errors run and eventually they stopped at a login prompt.
>So I logged in as rad0:WARNING - write UDMA ICRC erroroad0:FAILURE
>- write dma status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error 84oad0:FAILURE - write
>dma status=51<IRC,ABORTED>LBA=65t
>
>Managed to re-boot or re-set, can't remember which, and tried booting
>in safe mode but the file system was truly trashed.
>
>Re-installed (in safe (no dma) mode) and booted the installed OS in
>safe mode - whoopee, five vr0 watchdog timeouts after starting sshd
>but stability at last.
>
>So where's the sysctl to turn off dma setable from? /etc/sysctl.conf?
>Nope. It's not writeable from there. Added 'hw.ata.ata_dma="0"' to
>/boot/loader.conf and the rest was easy.
>
>It's just sitting on the LAN, it's as quiet as a Lamb.
>Should I enable dma?[3] NO DON'T! I hear you say.
>
>[1] Ranish Partition Manager http://www.ranish.com/part/ is just so
> handy sometimes. Boots swiftly from a floppy and even recognises
> freebsd partitions.
> Ranish failed to verify partitions on the "broken" drive.
>
>[2] There's probably a way to write all error messages to a file on a
> floppy or to some other safe media. I bet developers do it all
> the time.
>
>[3] Yeah I know - I shouldn't ask technical questions on newbies@. :)
>
>
>
Donno.....Download/Install m0n0wall (5MB) (Uses FreeBSD 4.9, and fully
supports the net48xx boards) or FreeBSD 4.9 (don't get 4.10-RC) (Mini
ISO, 200MB) to diagnoise weather its a software or a hardware issue,
it's probable that its a freebsd 5 issue.
Basic steps for m0n0wall test:
1. download the m0n0wall build for the net48xx board:
http://www.m0n0.ch/wall/download.php?file=net48xx-1.0.img
2. pop the notebook drive in a normal pc (*nix or windows).
3. follow this short guide and image the notebook drive with the file
you downloaded: http://www.m0n0.ch/wall/installation_embedded.php
4. pop the drive back into the net4801 and boot it.
5. scroll lock and check the freebsd bootup msgs.
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