Very Computer

Ok here's my situation: I have two HDs' both on the same controller. The
partition that I wanted to install FreeBSD to is wd1s4. However, with both
2.1.6 and the 2.2 beta the install fails and the following error message
appears in VC2:

wd1: interrupt timeout:
wd1: status 58<rdy, seekdone, drq> error 0
wd1: interrupt timeout:
wd1: status 58<rdy, seekdone, drq> error 1<no_dam>

I diabled *everything* I don't need in the kernel, leaving only the console
driver, floppy driver and the wdc0 (IRQ 14) HD driver. And I still get the
same error message.

I looked in the "bug report database" and the closest thing I found was
report "kern/2094" for which there was not any fix :(.

Is it because I have two drives on the same controller? Should I completely
unplug the other one during the install? If I did this would the problem
come back when the drive was re-enabled?

Thanks for any help,
James

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Due the the huge amounts of spam e-mail I have received I am no longer
including my e-mail address in a machine readable format in postings,
therefore you will not be able to just hit "e-mail reply", sorry for the
trouble,
I am bramal -=( at )=- iamerica.net

--
cheers, J"org

Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)

Your drive or motherboard is probably trying to be smart and spin down
the disk when it's been idle a while (that's an exclusive or).  FreeBSD
times out while waiting for the drive to spin up again.

This happens on one of my Sirocco 2550AT IDE drives in a 3-yo pentium,
but not on a similar drive in a younger computer (the older computer
also has a scsi drive, which may or may not make a difference to this
behaviour; the younger computer has a cheaper but more recent motherboard.
One day I'll swap the hardware around and see what causes what).
The following (which I start from rc.local) solved it (warning - *not*
cut 'n pasted):

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
        sleep 30
        for i in `df | sed '1d' | grep '^/dev/w[sd]' | awk ' { print $(NF)}' `
                touch $i/.keep_disk_spinning
        done
done

Adjust timeout to taste.  In any case, hearing the disks seek
every half minute on an otherwise quiescent machine is considerably less
annoying than hearing the *y things spinning up after each rwho ping
comes in (especially when you're trying to grab a nap :)

BTW: Is it possible for the kernel to know when a disk has been
spun down or is being spun up?

Cheers,

    Mike.

ps: my IDE drives are faster than my scsi, twice as big,
and cost half as much, so nyah :)

However, I think my problem has something to do with how I set up the drives.
The one odd thing is that my second drive is actually set to 81 (the slave
I guess :-\ ) but the drive is marked internally as 80. I'm not at all sure
what this means but it seems that there may be something funny about my setup.

What I've decided to do anyway, is to dedicate a second computer to FreeBSD,
with one drive. This should solve many of my problems since I think most of
them come from my funky setup :)

James

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Because of the vast amounts of spam e-mail I receive I am no longer
including my e-mail address in machine-readable format in my posts. This
means you won't be able to just hit "reply by mail" to send me e-mail. Sorry
for the trouble.
I am brammal -(=at=)- iamerica.net