*BSD News Article 39421


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
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From: kelly@woody.fsl.noaa.gov (Sean Kelly)
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.0 and EIDE CDROM/Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM
Message-ID: <1994Dec13.183657.2614@fsl.noaa.gov>
Sender: news@fsl.noaa.gov (USENET News System)
Organization: Forecast Systems Laboratory
References: <ngl1.20.2EECE4A4@psu.edu>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 18:36:57 GMT
Lines: 36

In article <ngl1.20.2EECE4A4@psu.edu>, Nicolas Leshock <ngl1@psu.edu> wrote:
>I am buying a P5-90 from Micron right after the holidays and I would like to 
>avoid paying the SCSI premium ($$$ constraints) for a HD and CDROM.

I'm running FreeBSD on a Micron P5 machine right now.  I also wanted
to avoid the SCSI premium for monetary reasons and went with their
inexpensive 1GB IDE option.  FreeBSD makes a GREAT operating system on
this platform.

>but what about EIDE CDROM?

Hmm, perhaps Micron recently changed their machine structure.  Mine
came with a Mitsumi CD-ROM and controller card.  It works fine with
FreeBSD.

>Is the Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM supported under FreeBSD?

If it's the *older* PCI card, then you're okay (the one with the
S3-Vision-864 chip: check the label ON THE CHIP, not the manual).
I've got one and it works fine.  But, according to
comp.windows.x.i386unix, Diamond has a second version of the Stealth
64 DRAM that uses the Tiro (?) 764 chip.  That one does not work at
all with XFree86 (they're working on it, though).  You might want to
take advantage of your sales rep here and ask for the older one.

The net's consensus is that Diamond's products and support are crap
and avoid them if you can.

Finally, one other important note: if your drive capacity is more than
525MB, the Phoenix BIOS will automatically use LBA mapping.  This
isn't a problem unless you want to boot multiple OS's using the
FreeBSD boot manager, which can't handle LBA.  The way to turn LBA off
is to lie to the BIOS and say your drive has less cylinders than it
really does to get the capacity below 525MB.

--k