freebsd crashes often. ata identify timeout
 

hi all
i run a freebsd 5.3 on a moderate machine that worked with every other OS i throw at it. one thing that sort of concerns me is the ATA IDENTIFY TIMEOUT which seem to randomly crash the bsd box. allowin no input what so ever, goin into an infinite loop of some kind, and then i have to force power off. sorry i dont' have the exact error messages. and sorry if i/someone else has posted this problem already. i'm thinkin about switchin to 4.11. it seemd that ironically programs like firefox have its newer versions supported in 4.11 as a direct package, as opposed to 5.3

oh and if anyone wants to tell me how to use perl to mv a $filename to $directory, i'd be really grateful. thanks in advance

FreeBSD 4.11 is "newer" than 5.3. It came out after 5.3 was released. It is one of the oddities about the current version numbering system.

Your perl question should be asked in a separate thread... probably in programming. I don't know anything about perl (well, okay... I know a bunch but was so scared by an experience where I wrote an entire webpage parser and stats gathering application in one line that I have blocked out everything and get the shakes when people mention perl).

Have you tried 4.11 or just 5.3? Because if one works and the other doesn't... well the obvious solution is go with what meets your needs. 5.3 may be a larger number but that doesn't mean 4.11 is older and should be abandoned if 5.3 is giving you worms.

If you have not tried it... can you give us some idea of what leads up to the problems ... maybe a dmesg output and possibly look in /var/log/messages and see if the error turned up there?

Hi, i took your advice and installed 4.11, i love the package selections, and only openoffice is giving me a headache but it's nice over all.

anyways. using 4.11, it still crashes twice a day or so. i checked
/var/log/messages but there was nothing weird.
thanks for responding