New hard drive, old BIOS?
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? 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 Would this be the likely result of an outdated BIOS (the blurb says copyright 1998)?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? 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. -- Roger ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: New hard drive, old BIOS?
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]
Re: New hard drive, old BIOS?
At 06:25 PM 6/22/03, you wrote: snip 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. Thanks. That was what I thought from reading various web sites on the subject, but I wanted reassurance. 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. None came with the drive. I hope I have one. Thanks again. -- Roger ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
