FreeBSD 7.0 SATA Controller

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 01:34:53PM -0400, Shaun Sabo wrote:
> Im trying to install FreeBSD 7.0 on a Dell XPS 600 desktop machine and im
> having a lot of trouble with this. First I could not use USB keyboards with
> the installer program (which is fine, i dont mind switching to PS2). then
> once i got into the sysinstaller it does not detect my Hard Disks. i also
> tried installing an old 6.2 cd that i had sitting around and remaking world
> and kernel but when i installed the kernel and restarted to go into single
> user mode the system could not mount the root filesystem. the motherboard im
> using is a nvidia nforce4 with Serial ATA hard disks. Does anyone know how
> to get FreeBSD 7.0 to recognize my hard drives?

Re: USB keyboard: USB support on FreeBSD is spotty.  That said, I've
never run into problems getting FreeBSD to detect and use a USB keyboard
(other USB devices are a different story).  You'd need to provide some
dmesg(8) output to verify, but I know that's going to be difficult until
you can get FreeBSD installed.

Re: SATA disks: I can assure you that FreeBSD works fine with SATA disks
connected to an nForce 4 chipset, because I've used them myself with no
issue.  Chances are there's a BIOS setting that's causing mayhem, or
you may be using a RAID array of some sort (since the XPS700 is one of
those "gamer lozlozlz" systems).

The manual for this system is here:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/xps700/

Screenshots of the BIOS are here:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2006/09/04/Dell_XPS_700_review/5

Are you using RAID at all on this system?  If so, chances are that's why
it doesn't see your array.

Finally, if available, I'd try a BIOS update.  Googling for results
shows that system has quite a large number of issues with its BIOSes,
and Dell has been fairly good about providing updates to fix problems.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |