[...]hi,
i wrote about this issue some weeks back, but have still not yet adequately resolved it. (http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/htdig/freebsd-questions/2004-November/0638 07.html)
to repeat the original problem, when installing 5.3R it fails about 12% into extracting base into \ on the emergency terminal, there is a stream of warnings and failures reading:
WARNING : WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC ERROR <LBA..... blah
FAILURE : WRITE_DMA status = 51<Ready, DSC, error>... blah
this continues until i run out of patience.
This is a really major problem that has affected every 5.3 and the more recent 5.2.1 machines I've operated with largish [1] hard drives. The novelty of losing several tens of gigs of data any time a drive gets busy wears off fairly quickly.
the advice i received was :
... mainly about checking hardware, and this is _not_ the issue. I've googled extensively on this and, as you did, replaced every hardware component in the IDE lines, including the disk drives, without affecting the problem.
So far as I can make out, there was a change to default settings at some point (I haven't scoured the CVS repository to find out exactly when) to enable DMA because some newer drives require this[2].
This also affects some attempts to install from CD using CDRW/DVD drives[3].
The only answer seems to be to disable DMA and I hope to put together a test machine in the next week to experiment with this. So far as I can see, there's a chance that adding:
hw.ata.ata_dma="0"
to /boot/loader.conf might help but I haven't yet tried this.
Peter.
[1] - at least >80G but I'm not sure where it kicks in.
[2] - http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/current/2004-11/0078.html
[3] - http://adam.kungfoohampster.com/lists/freebsd-stable/msg09493.shtml
--
the circle squared
network systems and software
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