More Intel ICH5 SATA150 hangs

[Mike Tancsa]

On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 18:34:12 -0400, in sentex.lists.freebsd.questions
you wrote:
>
>The system is a fairly new (3 months old) Dell 8300; 3Ghz Pentium with
>HT enabled.  The disk controller is an Intel ICH5 SATA controller, as
>mentioned above.  The disk is a WDC WD1600JD-75HBB0 (Western Digital).
>
>Last time I asked about this, it was suggested that the drive might be
>bad.  The bios had a test that passed the drive.  It was then
>suggested that I use the WD test utility.  I wasn't able to do this at
>the time because I don't have a floppy on this system, and creating a
>bootable CD from the image didn't work (I think it had a: hardcoded
>in).  Well, I finally broke down and hijacked the floppy from another
>machine and ran the WD diags.  Passed with flying colors, both the
>quick test and the extended test.  The drive is fine.
>

A useful program on RELENG_5 is 
/usr/ports/sysutils/smartmontools/

have a quick look to see if there are any bad sectors on the drive.
Run the daemon, and do a snapshot (smartctl -a ad0) before and after
the crash and see if there is anything new recorded on the drive.

>So today I was building OpenOffice and everything came to a screeching
>halt again.  See the log entries above.
>Same result the other poor schmuck got when he tried it.  There was
>also a suggestion that HT be turned off.  Kinda defeats the whole

HT works against you unless the scheduler is specifically aware of it,
and right now the ULE scheduler is broken. For sure turn HT off in
your BIOS and make sure you use SCHED_4BSD and NOT ULE
>
>Anyone have any other suggestions, info, whatever?  I'll try turning

What does  your kernel config look like ?  

	---Mike