Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr> writes:

> It's not the same problem: it's not surprising to have some lost interrupt (

Ok.

> In your case it seem that *no* interrupts are never generated, maybe for
> one specific command (because c_bcount & c_skip == 0, this is not a data
> transfer which trigger the problem). I suspect here that maybe your drive is
> not fully conformant, or that you have one of these "intelligent" IDE
> controllers which does fabcy things ...

And blymn@baea.com.au (Brett Lymn) writes:

> Do either of you guys have any device power management enabled in your
> bios that spins the disks down?

This is an OLD machine (I just checked and the BIOS is called
PhoenixBIOS v1.03 and is from 1992). So the machine is perhaps not
pre-historic, but at least somewhat medieval. It has never heard of
APM, does no spinning down of disks, and by no stretch of my
imagination can I believe the IDE controller doing fancy things ;-)

The drive could be strange, but against that theory stands: 
        a) three other OSes, including FreeBSD, installs and runs
           without a hitch
        b) if I move the disk to a newer machine and install NetBSD
           (without a problem) I can boot the new machine from the disk,
           but as soon as I move the (apparently bootable) disk back
           to the old machine I'm back at square one again (i.e.
           wdc0:0:0: device timeout etc).


Johan Ihrén, <johani@pdc.kth.se>,
phone: +46 (8) 790 6844, Center for Parallel Computers, 
Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden