Lockups related to (possibly IDE issues) ?

[Jamie]

In <200609082159.k88Lxeq1010976 at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Matthew Dillon <dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> mentions:
>    How is the hard drive and CD cabled to the motherboard?   Are they
>    going to a separate controller or are they sharing a cable ?


They are sharing a cable. (Just as before) Hard drive in 'LBA mode'
(But I've tried variations of "NORMAL/LARGE")

I've tried disconnecting the CDROM entirely as well as disabling the CDROM in
the BIOS. (as well as both) Same result. (I thought it was a conflict at first,
I've seen linux complain about /dev/hdb on other machines before.)

The old drive (the one that worked) was in "backwards" it was plugged in to the
first plug on the IDE cable. The instructions told me to put it as the last.
I've tried both, same lockup.

While booting from the hard drive it does tend to get past the startup
messages, hardware detection, etc.. usually tends to lockup just as it starts
to run the file system checks. 

One thing I am doing differently here is not allocating the full drive.

At the boot prompt: (lsdev, don't know if this is useful info or not gave this:

    disk0   BIOS drive A:
    disk1   BIOS drive C:
        disk1s1a FFS    <-- loaddev
        disk1s1b swap
        disk1s1{d,e,f,g} FFS

      disk1s2 ext2fs
      disk1s5 Linux swap
      disk1s{6,7,8,9} ext2fs


The warning I got when trying to load FreeBSD may have given some insight, but,
if I set BIOS to "autodetect" and it finds a geometry that is obviously
incorrect, is there any danger of having the physical device damaged? (is the
microcode in a hard drive smart enough to avoid doing things that are
physically dangerous?) If I can be sure of this, I'd try different settings
there and see what happens. 

Does dragonflybsd pay attention to BIOS's idea of the hard drive geometry, even
after the booting stage? It's getting well past the bootblocks.


Totally unrelated...

How come Dragonfly uses vixiecron instead of Dillon Cron? :-) (I always remembered
you as "that cron guy" before this, the cron that does cron and ONLY cron.)

Jamie
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