Hey folks,
I've decided to give FreeBSD (I need 3D acceleration, and sadly NVIDIA doesn't do OpenBSD or NetBSD drivers) a run as my main desktop OS, because I'm tired of the package management available under Linux (It's not that I don't like Linux, I love it, but I can't stand all the dependency issues you get with RPM and also a little with Debian's apt). I've got an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard, and I've hooked up an 80 GB IDE hard drive as IDE1 Master and I have a CD burner on IDE2 Master and a DVD burner on IDE2 Slave. When the FreeBSD installer has collected information about the partitioning and actually gets to the point where it writes it to the disk, it just gives me geometry errors and DMA errors, and can't write a damn thing to the drive. With Linux I've never experienced this problem.

I've tried installing the official FreeBSD 5.4, PC-BSD 0.8.2 and DesktopBSD RC2, all of them fails on the same problem.

I'm pretty much stuck and I really need some help on this one, also because I really wanna get to know FreeBSD so I don't only know Linux, because with people like Yahoo using BSD it's probably good, as a sysadmin, to know both right?

We're going to need a bit more detail. Can you post the exact errors you get, and precisely when they occur and the options you have selected?

Cheers--
Charles

for sure!

Regarding to what options I choose during the installation, I left pretty much all the options to the default setting, right before I get into the slice editor I get some error about some geometry size or something with my drive.

When the installer gets to the point where it writes the changes to the disk, it fails and says that it can't find /dev/ad0s1b

I also tried with a very simple disklabel layout with just one big /
and a one 1GB swap partition, same result..

I hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 and got to another shell or whatever it's called :P
It had some errors and DEBUG messages:

DEBUG: ioctl (3, TIOCCONS, NULL) = 0 (success)
DEBUG: Add mapping for /dev/ccuaa0 to sl0
DEBUG: Scanning disk ad0 for root filesystem
DEBUG: Scanning disk ad0 for swap partitions
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=0
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=0
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51 <READY,DSC,ERROR> error=84 <ICRC,ABORTED> LBA=0
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=0
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=0
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51 <READY,DSC,ERROR> error=84 <ICRC,ABORTED> LBA=0
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=0
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=0
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51 <READY,DSC,ERROR> error=84 <ICRC,ABORTED> LBA=0
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=0
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=0
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51 <READY,DSC,ERROR> error=84 <ICRC,ABORTED> LBA=0
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=0
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=0
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51 <READY,DSC,ERROR> error=84 <ICRC,ABORTED> LBA=0
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=0
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=0
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51 <READY,DSC,ERROR> error=84 <ICRC,ABORTED> LBA=0

It looks like you have a faulty hard disk.

I doubt that because I have just tried to install several different Linux distros, Mepis and Linspire and Ubuntu, on it, they all installed perfectly.

Considering the fault is at LBA 0 they may not pick it up, but every time I've seen messages like this it has turned out to be a faulty hard disk.

Download Seatools Desktop, burn it to a CD and run it.

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/index.html

Ahhh. And what was the "...some error about some geometry size..." that you are getting and did you take the suggested steps to correct that error as suggested by the error message?

There is a possibility of a bad drive, but I have never expereinced that.

Cheers--
Charles

Since you suggested I just ran the Full test with SeaTools, and it didn't find any errors.

Another reason wh yI don't think this is a hard drive issue is because I've tried with several working drives, several Linux'es installs fine, and I get the same error on all of them.

All I can suggest it try modifying a few options in the BIOS relating to the drives.

Okay, do you have any particular options in mind?

It's weird, I just tried installing FreeBSD on one of my SATA storage drives and that went fine.

Update: I just tried booting up FreeSBIE (FreeBSD 5.3), a FreeBSD LiveCD, and running sysinstall's partitioner on my IDE drive, and it wrote the changes perfectly, to me it seems like something is up with the FreeBSD installation discs.

If it isnt your install media, check your BIOS for a setting that turns off DMA. If there isnt one then I think that you can hit the space bar and type "set hw.ata.ata_dma=0" or "set hw.ata.atapi_dma=0" (with out the quotes) hit enter then type boot and go on with the install. Another thing to try would be to select the option to boot in to safe mode finish the install that way, and see if it boots with out problems after that. If not then add hw.ata.ata_dma=0 and hw.ata.atapi_dma=0 to your /boot/loader.conf. One last thing, you dont ave any 40 pin cables in that box do you?

If sysinstall reports that the geometry of the drives are being mis-reported, then either go into your BIOS and find out what the geometry is being reported to your bios, and use those values, or use a generic set. I have a couple of machines where I cannot get to what is being reported to the bios. One of the drives is 40gig and the other is 80gig. I used the same geometry on both. It works great. So, give this geometry a try:

16383/16/63

See what happens. Or you can just stick with the files system the liveCD gives you. Works for me.

Cheers--
Charles

For some reason, the BIOS on my nForce2 motherboard, can't be tweaked very much, I've tried pretty much every single setting regarding the IDE drives and nothing worked.

Well actually, the drive I was trying to install BSD on was a 40-pin IDE, and I have two of those.



I've gotten FreeBSD installed on a good SATA drive, and it works so well that I would donate 100 bucks to the FreeBSD guys if I had the options (I'm under 18 so I can't get a VISA card or stuff like that, nor do I have a 100 bucks )

I think I've figured out a little strategy to get my data off my EXT3 partitions, but it's gonna be a lot of drive swapping, and maybe a little help from my Xbox, which is running Gentoo Linux :P