On Sun, 22 Jun 2003, Roger Merritt wrote:
> I've just installed a new, 40GB hard drive, and copied my system over to > it. It booted and seems to be running fine, but I have a couple of worries. > > 1. My BIOS setup utility doesn't detect the drive using the Auto Detect > Hard Drives feature. In fact, when I tried to run it, it hung. However, > when I just went ahead and booted FreeBSD (on my old hard drive) it didn't > seem to have any problem seeing and writing to the new drive. Is this a > serious enough problem to take the risk of trying to flash an upgrade to my > BIOS? FreeBSD only relies on the system BIOS to boot the system; once the kernel loads it disables the system BIOS, so as long as it is booting normally everything should be fine. While it most likely wouldn't hurt anything I wouldn't make flashing the ROM a priority unless it was having problems starting up or there was some feature in the newer BIOS I wanted to take advantage of. > 2. When I booted up using the new hard drive, everything seemed to go OK > for a while, then I got a number of error messages on the console: "ad0s1a: > UDMA ICRC error reading fsbn 96639 of 48288-28369 (ad0s1 bn 96639; cn 6 tn > 3 sn 60) falling back to PIO mode". Would this be the likely result of an > outdated BIOS (the blurb says "copyright 1998")? Or is it more likely the > result of old cables which don't meet the ATA66 spec? This is typically the result of faulty IDE cables--if a new one came with the drive try that and see if it still occurs. > Subjectively, the machine seems to be running somewhat faster, despite the > lack of DMA (I don't know if DMA ever worked on this machine). And it's a > great relief to now have plenty of free space. Even if Ultra-DMA isn't supported it very likely is faster, drives have made a lot of advances since 1998, they spin faster, have larger read/write buffers and improved data-handling algorithms. Cheers, Viktor _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
