Trouble with ataraid (was: 250G SATA drive?)

[João Carlos Mendes Luís]

Followup to my message with more news.

It is not a problem with mount_ntfs.  Indeed, it seems to be a problem
with the ataraid code.

Today I booted from 5.3RC4 install CD, and mounted NO partition on the
problem disk.  But this was enough to corrupt the partition again.

How can I know if the ATA RAID code is LBA48 compatible?  The chipset is
a Promise 20378, which is supported, in theory.

João Carlos Mendes Luís wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>     I've just bought a Seagate 250G SATA drive to run in a shared
> desktop at home.  It should have 3 boot partitions: 16M FreeBSD 5, 16M
> linux, 32M NTFS for Windows XP.  The remaining wil be formatted with
> FAT32 to be used as a common data for the 3 operating systems.
> 
>     Well, everything seemed to be fine.  I copied the FreeBSD partition
> from the previous installed disk with dump(8), and installed XP from
> CDs.  But suddenly, the data and NTFS partitions began to disappear.  I
> don't know exactly what were the steps used to crash the disk, but it
> happened at least 3 times, after 3 full windows installs (which are not
> quick, for my sadness).  In the last one I could almost detect it.
> 
>     I finished the initial windows instalation, and booted into FreeBSD
> to make sure the NTFS and FAT partitions were available.  They seemed to
> be.  Then I reboot into windows, and it crashed, with a missing HAL.DLL.
>  Boot again into FreeBSD, and the NTFS partition still seemed ok.  But I
> gone into the \WINDOWS\system32, and did an ls.  The kernel pushed some
> errors with "bad magic" or something like that, and the file system
> locked.  Also, the boot information for the first FAT32 partition has
> been completely destroyed, leaving it unreadable.
> 
>     The mainboard is an ASUS K8V, with 1G RAM.  I'm running the 32 bit
> version of FreeBSD, although it is an AMD64 machine.  The 250G SATA disk
> is on the promise RAID, and I have another PATA 120G on the promise
> RAID, and a 40G PATA on standard IDE.
> 
>     I already had a problem with a previous ASUS board in which the
> promise raid could not deal with disks bigger than 120G.  The symptons
> were very similar.  Could this be the problem?  Does somebody know if
> FreeBSD or mount_ntfs has any kind of disk size limitation in this hardware?
> 
>     Oh, I did remember now that I was using mount_ntfs -o noatime, if
> that matters.
> 
>     Thanks for any help,
> 
> 	Jonny
> 
> PS: Now it has been fully reformatted with no NTFS, using FAT32 instead.
>  But I'm afraid of getting into FreeBSD again in this machine.   Please
> help!   :-(
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