Hi All!

Let me say that i'm so happy moving to FreeBSD (or BSD as a whole). It works with me on many levels except on this old laptop of mine. I need advice on how to solve the problem.


I have an old Twinhead Slimnote 9166CZ, (Pentium MMX 166Mhz), that has an Integrated Technology Express IT8330G chipset and IDE controller in it. Phoenix Bios 4.0 Release 5.12

The problem is, when i boot the FreeBSD 6.2 Install CD1 and start the setup, it gives me an error message saying

No disks found! Please verify that your disk controller is being properly probed at boot time.

Reading online, I didn't find anything useful for that controller on BSD. But reading the manual for ata(4), it should revert to PIO mode if DMA doesn't work (which afaik what happened to me in Linux until i configured the drivers).

From what i remember, I saw something in the booting time of the CD that says that it detected the drive as disk0. And i tried booting with all the options listed, but still no luck.

I'm not sure what's going on here, and not sure how to proceed. I'd appreciate any help on this. If you need more info, let me know.

Thanks.

You should take a look in the BIOS. I think that BIOS of that era had to have the disk geometry spelled out in the BIOS. Many of those old BIOS did not read the disk geometry in from the drive during boot. So check the BIOS to make sure that both the IDE ports and the hard drive(s) are configured correctly.

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Steve Stites

Thanks for the reply,

Yes, the BIOS is very old.. The only thing I can find related to the IDE or Hard drive is the "Hard Disk" section. But inside you can't change a lot. there's the following settings currently enabled.

Hard Disk 3253 MB
Cylinders 6304
Heads 16
Sectors/Track 63
Write Precomp: None

Multi-Sector Transfers: 16 Sectors
LBA Mode Control: Enabled
32 Bit I/O: enabled
Transfer Mode: Fast PIO 4 (other options are Standard, F PIO 1, 2, 3)

I tried changing the Transfer Mode to Standard, and still the same problem.

I can't seem to change anything else. The above settings are also automatically detected when you set it to Auto.

I'd be happy to show some more debug info if it helps, if you tell me what to do


Edit: I just took out the hard drive to double check, and the values seem correct.

Hitachi DK238A-32
(CYL 6304 H16 S63)