On Apr 14, Jonathan Stone wrote
> I remember very, _very_ clearly. (I spent a lot of time in the lab
> booting test kernels, both with and without a CD in the drive).

I didn't state this didn't happen, just that I didn't find infos on
it. Maybe my mail was not clear ?

> 
> Maybe i have the date wrong? Sometime between november and february.

Ha ok. So I looked back a bit more in cvs, and in my mail archives from last
year. I think the patch which solved your problem was:
--- /mnt/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/sys/dev/ata/ata.c    Tue Oct 13 13:10:23 1998
+++ ata.c       Sun Nov 15 15:03:12 1998
@@ -82,7 +82,7 @@
        } else {
                wdc_c.r_command = ATAPI_IDENTIFY_DEVICE;
                wdc_c.r_st_bmask = 0;
-               wdc_c.r_st_pmask = WDCS_DRDY | WDCS_DRQ;
+               wdc_c.r_st_pmask = WDCS_DRQ;
        }
        wdc_c.flags = AT_READ | flags;
        wdc_c.timeout = 1000; /* 1s */

and has been commited to ata.c as rev 1.3:
----------------------------
revision 1.3
date: 1998/11/16 11:25:41;  author: bouyer;  state: Exp;  lines: +2 -2
For ATAPI IDENTiFY, poll only for DRQ, some devices don't assert DRDY at this
point.


As far as I can see this is still here, so I fear the problem is
something else.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
--