I can't install pfSense on a IDE drive!
When I install pfSense on an EIDE hard drive from the pfSense LiveCD, it is completed. However, during the boot up from the hard drive, pfSense reports DMA errors and fails to come up. How do I fix it? Or what hard drive should I get to ensure there is no compatibility problems?
Please use our pfSense CD image to install. The image can be found at the following URL (for version 1.2.3):
http://support.hacom.net/pub/pfsense/pfHacom-1.2.3.iso
Contact technical support if it does not work.
Technical details
This is a problem of FreeBSD could not reliably detect the "80-pin" EIDE cable for 2.5inch laptop hard drive. It will try to set the DMA rate higher than what the cable can deliver. There will be several DMA timeout errors reported. And eventually, pfSense will give up on the hard drive.
On our version of pfSense, we set the initial DMA to UDMA4 or ATA-66. There is also a tunable sysctl parameter: hw.ata.ata_dma_limit (default to 4). It seems to resolve all of the DMA time out errors on our systems.