WRITE_DMA problem again

[Lowell Gilbert]

Cezar Fistik <cezar at arax.md> writes:

> Hello Kendall,
> 
> Friday, April 22, 2005, 8:50:42 PM, you wrote:
> 
> > Anyhow, my understanding is that the current work-around to this
> > problem is to turn DMA off for your ata drives. I guess this can be
> > done manually with the atacontrol command as I've been doing (though
> > as you'll see in my message linked above, I apparently need to do it
> > differently/sooner). I also understand that you can do so by setting
> > hw.ata.ata_dma="0"  in  /boot/loader.conf  .
> 
> Yes, I saw this suggestion in other posts, too. Well, I gave it a try.
> I disabled dma yesterday and today I got the following:
> 
>  Timecounter "TSC" frequency 498669235 Hz quality 800
>  ad0: 8693MB <IBM-DJNA-370910/J74OA30K> [17662/16/63] at ata0-master PIO4
>  ad0: TIMEOUT - WRITE_MUL retrying (2 retries left) LBA=1573151
>  ad0: FAILURE - WRITE_MUL timed out
> 
> That's something completely new. Does anyone know what that means?

Like the symptoms you got with DMA enabled, it *probably* means you
have *some* kind of hardware problem.  The cable would be a likely
candidate, but I'd definitely be making extra backups if I were you.