SATA connected CD/DVD drives, any experience?

[teig]

Hi,

has anyone any experience using SATA connected DVD drives with FreeBSD?
Does it work just as a normal IDE connected CD/DVD drive?

That is, can one get rid of IDE completely?

[vermaden]

I have both HDD and DVDRW attached as SATA and works very good, same way as ATA DVDRW, Intel ICH8 southbridge here.

[teig]

Thanks,

reason being that I just bought a motherboard that appears to have a semi faulty ATA bus. OS'es boot from CD but don't get very far -> no installation possible.
And I can't mount dvd's (FreeBSD installed using another board).

SATA is a possible way out instead of being without a board for several days!

[JimC]

I can't boot the 7.0 installation disk from a SATA DVD drive. It seems to be a widespread problem.

[teig]

Ok, thanks, there goes that solution. At least for now.

[vermaden]

Originally Posted by JimC

I can't boot the 7.0 installation disk from a SATA DVD drive. It seems to be a widespread problem.

I booted and installed FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE, FreeBSD 7-STABLE and FreeBSD 8-CURRENT from SATA DVD without any problems.

[windependence]

Originally Posted by JimC

I can't boot the 7.0 installation disk from a SATA DVD drive. It seems to be a widespread problem.

I can't agree with this. I have several of these all with different and varied hardware and they ALL work. What are you basing your assumption that this is a widespread problem on? I see no evidence of that.

-Tim

[JimC]

I entered READ_BIG and FreeBSD in Google and found many people having problems with 7.0 and SATA DVD drives. I have no problem with 6.3 but tried 3 different 7.0 install disks and encountered the same READ_BIG error when booting.

I am using an ASUS P5KPL-CM motherboard. The problem seems to depend on the hardware being used.

[TerryP]

Several months ago, PC-BSD 1.5.x users had occasional issues with booting the disks off SATA CD/DVD-ROM, and that is based on one of the FreeBSD 6.3-Stable builds. People on forums.pcbsd.org generally dove into, "its a FreeBSD problem" and let it be; although posts there have subsided for a long time about such issues.



I believe that if there is any issue with using SATA optical disk drives in modern FreeBSD, it probably is specific to certain odd models or hardware configurations --> that is my humble opinion.


All of mine are EIDE, so i can't comment on CD/DVD drives. I do know that SATA hard drives work *perfect* on FreeBSD 6.0 Release through the last 7-Stable. The only issue I've experienced is the ATA_STATIC_ID option in kernels causes my first (and only) SATA drive to be detected as ad4 and without the option it detects the drive as ad0.

[tad1214]

I get the READ_BIG issue, but it just times out 3 times, then continues on happy with my SATA DVD (ASUS DVD).

[Gemini]

Originally Posted by tad1214

I get the READ_BIG issue, but it just times out 3 times, then continues on happy with my SATA DVD (ASUS DVD).

I have a similar issue with an Nv nForce4-SLI board and a generic SATA DVD drive.

The system will spit out various READ_BIG errors, as well as some INQUIRY ILLEGAL REQUEST errors. However, they do not appear to affect the stability of the system, or of the files being read.

I just ignore them.

[Oko]

That is way is always a good idea to have floppy drive and boot the computer via floppy. Another option is install Windows and then do the Network boot or even better installing OS via serial console if your mother board have any.

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by TerryP

All of mine are EIDE, so i can't comment on CD/DVD drives. I do know that SATA hard drives work *perfect* on FreeBSD 6.0 Release through the last 7-Stable. The only issue I've experienced is the ATA_STATIC_ID option in kernels causes my first (and only) SATA drive to be detected as ad4 and without the option it detects the drive as ad0.

That's not a bug, that's the nature of how the BIOS numbers drives and how the kernel interprets the numbers.

The BIOS numbers all the IDE controllers before the SATA controllers.

If you use ATA_STATIC_ID, then the numbering of your {P|S}ATA devices will be determined by the port they are connected to, and will not change if you add/remove drives. The master IDE controller will be ad0 and ad1, the secondary IDE controller will be ad2 and ad3. The first SATA port will be ad4, the next SATA port ad5, and so on. If you only have 1 SATA device plugged into first SATA port, with no IDE devices, it will always be called ad4. Add an IDE device to the primary master controller and it will be called ad0, and the SATA will still be called ad4. Add an IDE device to secondary master, and it will be called ad2, the other IDE device still ad0, and the SATA device still ad4.

If you don't use ATA_STATIC_ID, then the numbering of your {P|S}ATA devices will be determined by the order that the kernel detects them. If you have no IDE devices and 1 SATA device, then that device will show as ad0. If you add an IDE device, it will show as ad0 and the SATA device becomes ad2. Add another IDE device, and everything gets renumbered again.

So, it all depends on how you want your devices to appear (consistent based on port, or consecutively numbered starting at 0).

[Gemini]

Originally Posted by Oko

That is way is always a good idea to have floppy drive and boot the computer via floppy. Another option is install Windows and then do the Network boot or even better installing OS via serial console if your mother board have any.

Floppy drives are notorious for their poor reliability. I have a stack of old internal floppy drives where half cannot reliably read their own disks. The other half became misaligned over the years, making it difficult to swap disks between units. I keep an external USB floppy drive, just in case. At least with it, if it becomes misaligned, I'm using the same misaligned drive to read back the same data.

Next to a CDROM, I'd day that network booting via PXE is the next best way to install. Most modern NICs have moderately good PXE code.

Unfortunately, the FreeBSD sysinstall program appears to lack a built-in PXE server function. I've used embedded BSD/OS products that give you this option with the install CD, and it is quite slick. You don't even need to burn a CD-R, instead mounting an ISO image in VMWare and letting it act as a PXE server via a bridged virtual network interface.