On Sat, 27 Sep 1997, A.S.MCGough wrote:

> After getting thouroughly sick of the lack of space on my original 850Meg 
> Ide drive I decided to replace it with a Maxtor 3.2Gig drive. After 
> re-installing NetBSD (using an old kernel) I upgraded to a recent kernel 
> to discover that the system refused to boot. It reaches the stage of 
> identifying the maxtor drive and then just hangs:
> 
> Sep 12 17:23:14 court4 /netbsd: wdc0 at mainbus0 base
> 0xf62107c0-0xf62107df irq 9
> Sep 12 17:23:14 court4 /netbsd: wd0 at wdc0
> drive 0: <Maxtor 83062 A7> Sep 12 17:23:14 court4 /netbsd: wd0: 2927MB,
> 5948 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sec
> Sep 12 17:23:14 court4 /netbsd: wd0: using 16-sector 16-bit pio 
> transfers, lba addressing
> 
> If the CD-Rom drive is physically removed the system runs fine. Only 
> kernel after Nov 1996 show this problem [I do remember there being some 
> work on the wd driver some time round the end of last year]. 

Ah, now it turns out that this is a problem I've been having too,
although I'd assumed it was something to do with some other feature of
my system until recently. I only started using RiscBSD at the start of
this year, so I didn't know the date of the problem.

I, too, have a Maxtor (mine's a 2.7 Gb) as a master and one of the
dual-speed Cumana CD-ROMs with a botch board (the kind Acorn were
shipping for a while, I think) as a slave, on the internal interface.
They work fine as a combination under RISC OS, but RiscBSD, as in your
case, hangs when trying to probe the CD.

Just to clarify, I'm not talking about actually using the drive under
RiscBSD, just not having to unplug it in order to get the system to
come up.

After a bit of experimentation, using a Connor (210Mb) drive as master
allows the probe of the CD to cope, and plugging in an ATAPI CD
(albeit with no drivers) also works fine.

Until recently, my solution was to build a new kernel, and tell it not
to probe the second IDE (mail me if you want my old kernel, although
it's not all that recent). Since then I've been allowed at the
development kernel, for which, of course, I don't have the sources and
so can't apply this fix. Hence for now my CD is disconnected, since
I'd rather have RiscBSD than be able to access my CD-ROM under RISC OS
- and for the record, it seems that the botch board is the problem,
not the drive itself. 

I've grovelled at Robert Black to build me a new kernel, applying the
same patch that I did (hi Rob - any progress?) Obviously the ideal
solution is to find what RiscBSD is doing during probing that is
different from RISC OS, and find out how the botch board and Maxtor's
interpretation of the IDE standard are getting confused - I feel it's
something fairly convoluted, since it requires all three conditions to
constitute the problem. Modifying RiscBSD's probing would solve the
problem, but it's quite a lot of effort to support some pretty old
hardware (which can't be used under RiscBSD anyway), so I'm not
expecting it to be high priority.

I'm assuming that your problems here are with the same CD as mine, btw
- if you're using a top of the line ATAPI CD then the problem is
obviously more relevant.

> Some help would be appreciated as it's rather anoying to have to open up 
> the case each time I want to re-boot to unix.

Hope that's been some use, if only to let you know that you're not
alone. If anyone wants to record this problem for compatability
reasons, let me know and I can look up the type of the drive. I
believe someone else was having CD problems a long time ago, but
I'm afraid I can't find the posting, so I'm not sure whether it was
related. Good luck.

-- 
Andrew W. Garrard           Advanced Rendering Technology Ltd.
Graphics Programmer         Mount Pleasant House, 2 Mount Pleasant
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