LG combo drive and Attansic Technology ethernet card on Asus P5Q Pro

[Dieter]

>> The drive is a new LG combo drive, I believe GH22LP20 or something close to it.

I have an older LG PATA combo drive which works ok.

Does it show up when booting?  (Does dmesg work from the installation shell?)

Maybe you need to "kldload atapicam" ?  Or is that only needed for writing,
I forget...

> The only thing I can think of is that the P5Q boards use a Marvell
> ATA/IDE controller (yes, you read that correctly).  I wonder if FreeBSD
> somehow lacks support for this...

7.0 ata man page claims support for:

     Marvell         88SX5040, 88SX5041, 88SX5080, 88SX5081, 88SX6041,
                     88SX6081, 88SX6101, 88SX6141.

> I also tried to install Ubuntu and it works fine (but I really would
> like to have FreeBSD!).

Have you tried NetBSD or OpenBSD?

> > thank you very much for your help.  I downloaded the 7.1 prerelease,
> > but unfortunately didn't solve the problem with the CD/DVD.  As for
> > the ethernet card, it's a kind of catch 22: to see if the card is
> > working I should install the OS, but I cannot from the DVD.

Who says you *have* to install from a DVD?  You might be able to install
from NetBSD or OpenBSD, or maybe even penguinix.  Or connect the disk
to some other FreeBSD box.  Installing Unix is basically fdisk and/or
disklabel, newfs, mount, tar, edit config files, reboot.  Sometimes you
need to get creative.

# mount partition(s) for FreeBSD on /mnt
# mount iso on /mnt2

export DESTDIR=/mnt
cd /mnt2/7.0-RELEASE

for foo in base doc catpages dict games info manpages proflibs ports lib32
do
        cd ${foo}
        ./install.sh
        cd ..
done

> Understood.  This situation is very frustrating; people often run into
> on Windows as well ("How do I get the Ethernet driver for my NIC from
> the web site if Windows doesn't already have support for my NIC?!").

Plug in a working Ethernet card.
Use RS-232 and ppp.
CD/DVD
attach disk to a working machine
etc. etc.

> > I cannot even install over FTP, because the institution I am in wants
> > my MAC address to allow this pc to connect to internet and I cannot
> > get to the MAC address without installing an OS (at least, I don't
> > know how... I tried an Ubuntu LiveCD, but it doesn't recognize the
> > ethernet card, either).

Sometimes the MAC address is printed on a sticker.

Copy files to a local machine, ftp from that machine?

Copy ISOs to a spare partition somehow.  Then mount the ISOs using
mdconfig kludge.