i386/73666: 5.3 UDMA error WD1600 can't partition drive

[Floris 'Tamama' van Gog]

The following reply was made to PR i386/73666; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Floris 'Tamama' van Gog <floris at vangog.net>
To: freebsd-gnats-submit at FreeBSD.org, pluto_777 at mac.com
Cc:  
Subject: Re: i386/73666: 5.3 UDMA error WD1600 can't partition drive
Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 15:44:40 +0200

 Same problem installing 5.3 on a p120 laptop with a 3GB drive. 
 laptop/hardisk supports UDMA2 mode.
 
 After reading the mailing lists from back in sept 2004, the following 
 fix can be applied:
 At boot, select 6 (loader prompt) and type:
 
 set hw.ata.ata_dma=0
 boot
 
 This will disable DMA and completely remove any problems related to it. 
 then it will continue to boot normally
 
 After install, upon boot, again disable dma (else it will not be able to 
 mount.. it cant access the drive)
 To automagically apply this upon every boot, you can alter 
 /boot/loader.conf to include the following:
 
 hw.ata.ata_dma=0
 
 Now, I think this is not really a fix, at most a silly temporary patch. 
 It completely disables dma (udma modes) and severely impacts system 
 performance.
 
 Note that my in the case of my slow Pentium 120, the drive becomes 
 completely unaccessable when dma mode is enabled. The complaints are 
 timeouts on dma. It does not seem related to network (I dont ave any), 
 or ACPI.