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Date:      Tue, 11 Jul 2000 23:02:43 +0200
From:      Bernd Luevelsmeyer <bernd.luevelsmeyer@heitec.net>
To:        John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        John Reynolds~ <jreynold@sedona.ch.intel.com>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG, sos@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: ad4: READ command timeout -- how to debug this?
Message-ID:  <396B8B73.5391976C@heitec.net>
References:  <200007091756.KAA75814@john.baldwin.cx>

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John Baldwin wrote:
> 
> [ cc'ing Søren who wrote ata in case he can use the drive model in a bad drives
>   list ]
> 
> On 07-Jul-00 John Reynolds~ wrote:
[...]
> > Are these messages (not the dmesg output) indicative of a hardware problem?
> > Bad cabling? Cosmic rays?
> 
> Your hard drive has issues.  It needs to run in PIO mode rather than DMA
> mode.  You can do this with the hw.atamodes sysctl.  For example, my
> maxtor drive is ad2 in my system, so I have this in my /etc/sysctl.conf:
> 
> > cat /etc/sysctl.conf
> hw.atamodes=dma,---,pio,---
> 
> Type 'sysctl hw.atamodes' to see what the current value is, and change the
> 5th entry (corresponding to ad4) from "dma" to "pio".  Then create an
> /etc/sysctl.conf with the new setting.  Note that your performance is going
> to go way down after this, but that is the price of buying Maxtor it seems.
> :(


I've got a 4.0-STABLE machine that also needs to run in pio mode, for
all 4 IDE drives. This is apparently not because of the drives but
because of the mainboard, which is a quite old ASUS thing (Asus
PE55TP4DC with an Award Bios v. 4.51PG if I got that right; also
supposed to support SMP but I never got it to work with two pentiums).

When it boots and wants to mount the drives FreeBSD shows messages such
as:
  ata0-master: success setting up WDMA2 mode on CMD646 chip
  ad0: <IBM-DTTA-351010/T56OA73A> ATA-4 disk at ata0 as master
  ad0: 9671MB (19807200 sectors), 19650 cyls, 16 heads, 63 S/T, 512 B/S
  ad0: 16 secs/int, 32 depth queue, WDMA2
  ad0: piomode=4 dmamode=2 udmamode=2 cblid=0
  Creating DISK ad0
  Creating DISK wd0

and later:
  ad0: READ command timeout - resetting
  ata0: resetting devices .. ata0: mask=03 status0=50 status1=50
  ata0-master: success setting up WDMA2 mode on CMD646 chip
  ata0-slave: success setting up WDMA2 mode on CMD646 chip
  done
  ad0: READ command timeout - resetting
  ata0: resetting devices .. ata0: mask=03 status0=50 status1=50
  ata0-master: success setting up WDMA2 mode on CMD646 chip
  ata0-slave: success setting up WDMA2 mode on CMD646 chip
  done
  ad0: READ command timeout - resetting
  ata0: resetting devices .. ata0: mask=03 status0=50 status1=50
  ata0-master: success setting up WDMA2 mode on CMD646 chip
  ata0-slave: success setting up WDMA2 mode on CMD646 chip
  done
  ad0: READ command timeout - resetting
  ata0-master: WARNING: WAIT_READY active=ATA_ACTIVE_ATA
  ata0-master: success setting up PIO4 mode on generic chip
  ad0: trying fallback to PIO mode
  ata0: resetting devices .. ata0: mask=03 status0=50 status1=50
  ata0-master: success setting up PIO4 mode on generic chip
  ata0-slave: success setting up WDMA2 mode on CMD646 chip
  done
  ad0s1: type 0xa5, start 0, end = 19807199, size 19807200 : OK

It does this for all 4 IDE drives.
After numerous attempts, I've given up on DMA mode with this mainboard.
Because the timeouts while booting take so long I've created a patch for
/usr/src/sys/dev/ata/ata-dma.c in which the DMA mode is commented out.
In case anyone is interested, I will provide the full dmesg output or
the ata-dma.c patch (or the kernel configuration, or whatever) on
request.

I don't consider this to be a FreeBSD bug; rather I think this mainboard
has some problems.


Greetings,
	Bernd


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