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Date:      Sat, 5 Aug 2000 11:26:43 -0700
From:      "Dan O'Connor" <dan@mostgraveconcern.com>
To:        "Richard Mahoney" <rbm49@student.canterbury.ac.nz>, "freebsd-questions" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: CMD 640 ATA controller !WARNING!
Message-ID:  <005201bfff0a$b4e7a8e0$029b140a@danco>

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>Under 3.4 the boot messages complained that my CMD 640 ATA
>controller was rubbish. For all that, 3.4 made concessions for
>substandard hardware. It seemed to include a workaround and my
>CD-ROM worked.
>
>I'm unhappy to say that this doesn't seem to be the case with 4.0.
>
>When I boot under 4.0 I get:
>
>atapci0: <CMD 640 ATA controller !WARNING! buggy chip data loss
>    possible> irq 14 at device 8.0 on pci0
>atapci0: Busmastering DMA not supported


I had this same problem when I upgraded my old Dell Pentium-90 to 4.0. Your
best bet is to replace your IDE controller with a add-in card.

My recommendation is a Promise Technologies Ultra-33 card. These are no
longer made, but you might be able to find one if you hunt hard enough. It's
a PCI card that requires no drivers, supports Bus Mastering, and works fine
with FreeBSD 4.x.

Warning: Stay away from the Promise Ultra-66. Although it supports faster
drives, it doesn't support ATAPI devices like CD-ROMs, CD-RW, or ATAPI tape
drives (the Ultra-33 does, however).

Another option would be one of the generic ISA multi-function cards. These
generally have extra serial and/or parallel ports, plus an IDE port. The one
I use in another machine (Vitex MP787) only has one IDE interface, limiting
it to two drives (I have a 4GB IDE drive as master and a 40x CD-ROM drive as
slave). Since it's an ISA card, it won't work in UDMA modes, only PIO3 &
PIO4. Also, if you go this route, try to find a card with jumpers, not
Plug-n-Play, so you can set it up the way you want. (Since even MS Windows
doesn't handle ISA PnP cards quite right, I try to avoid them like the
plague!)

Good luck,

--Dan

--
Dan O'Connor
On Matters of Most Grave Concern
    http://www.mostgraveconcern.com
FreeBSD Cheat Sheets
    http://www.mostgraveconcern.com/freebsd/




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