Hardware

I have 3 single board computer boads all three with Intel BX chipset.
All 3 boards load fine via a 2½" hard drive. However switching to compact flash based install the freebsd insists on enabling LBA-support through the ata-drivers regardless of the bios settings. And by doing so the boot halts after freebsd have tried a number of different LBA-settings:

ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=3897935
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA retrying (0 retry left) LBA=3897935
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA timed out LBA=3897935

And so it keeps on trying a number of different values for LBA before grinding to a halt stating that loading the conf-file is impossible.

The compact flash card is a 2 gigabyte Kingston CF/2GB-S and it is split into two partitions (created by the installer), one for the OS and one for storage (images, conf-files).

Booting into bsd in safe mode is done without a hitch. Which leeds me to believe that the drivers for the ATA PIIX-4 controller is either not used or at least configured differently which allows the compact flash card to be read in chs-mode and thus the conf-file is found.

So any and all input to modify the boot up process to accomodate the ata drivers NOT jumping to LBA-mode would be appreciated.

Oh by the way, I've tried booting on a fairly moderne platform (P4 SiS651 chipset) with the exact same result. That's 4 different boards, same result. It certainly looks like the culprit is the CF-card, but I'm not ready to abandon it yet as it works okay when respecting its needs.

My skills with unix-type OS's are low to medium though, so any requests for further information would preferably be followed by a small guide on how to ascertain it.


Cheers,
/Bo