ATA problems with FreeBSD 5.4

[Bob Johnson]

On 6/23/05, Matthias Buelow <mkb at incubus.de> wrote:
 > Joao Carlos Mendes Luis <jonny at jonny.eng.br> writes:
 >
 > >kernel sends some messages, "ata0-master: failure - ATA_IDENTIFY timed
 > >out", "ata0-master: failure - ATA_IDENTIFY timed out", and them no hard
 > >disk is identified, so I cannot install the system.  If I boot from a
 > >pre-installed hard disk, its even worse, after these message, I get a
 >
 > I've started experiencing the same here, occasionally on reboot, but
 > only after I have upgraded to 5.4-STABLE on June 21. Before, I haven't
 > seen that issue. In a similar situation to yours, Windows XP here has no
 > problems so I don't assume it's hardware related. (And, when it actually
 > boot, the problem doesn't seem occur anymore then while the system is
 > up.) I'm now hesitating to update other machines because of that, hope
 > it gets identified (and fixed) soon.
 >

Hmmm.  I encountered this one time on the laptop I upgraded to 
5.4-RELEASE (not -STABLE) a few weeks ago, although I had booted the 
system several times prior to that with no problems.  It got part way 
throught the boot then started throwing that error message.  I powered 
down the system and tried again and it worked ok.

Because I had installed a new hard drive as part of the upgrade, and the 
error actually happened the first time I rebooted the system from 
Windows to FreeBSD (dual boot system), and it was also the first time I 
booted it with my wireless card using the NDIS wrapper, I came to no 
conclusion about the proximate cause other than to hope that my new hard 
drive was not defective.

I have booted the system (warm and cold, and reboot from Windows) at 
least a dozen times since, and it has not repeated.

Given your experience, I am beginning to suspect that this is a race 
condition that is more likely to hit some systems than others.  I've had 
other problems with the NDIS driver wrapper, but since you aren't using 
it, I guess it likely isn't the cause of this issue.

- Bob