Solved Oldie turned Newbie - bsdinstall doesn't see SSD

J

judmarc

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth I ran FreeBSD and was familiar with sysinstall. Out of curiosity I wanted to install FreeBSD (or PC-BSD) again, but have run into a problem trying to install the November 17th 11-STABLE amd64 snapshot which I'm sure is not original to me.

bsdinstall sees the USB stick from which I'm running the install and my external HDD (where I store all my music files, and which I don't want to touch) just fine, but doesn't bring up my 500GB internal SSD as an option. The SSD currently has Win 10 and Lubuntu installed on a couple of partitions, and also has plenty of free space where I'd love to install FreeBSD.

Guidance is most welcome, or pointers to previous threads (that I wasn't able to find, but I'm guessing exist), or just where in the FM I need to look are good as well.

Thanks.
 
That's somewhat odd in my experience. The installer sees any SSDs that I have on a few different laptops. I'm assuming this is a standard SATA connected SSD? (Nor do I recollect seeing this problem). What kind of system is it on? (Not that I have answers, but perhaps someone else does.
 
Yes, standard SATA-connected SSD (Samsung 840). Desktop self-built originally in 2010, with mobo (ASUS Rampage III) and SATA controller (Marvell) dating from back then. I've had FreeBSD installed and running on this machine back in the sysinstall days.
 
Poking around the forum a bit more, I wonder if this has something to do with the fact that my machine is pre-UEFI, i.e., BIOS. Is there an install img or iso that will work with my BIOS-based system (or a toggle for the recent 11-17 STABLE memstick.img I used that I wasn't seeing)?
 
judmarc said:
Yes, standard SATA-connected SSD (Samsung 840). Desktop self-built originally in 2010, with mobo (ASUS Rampage III) and SATA controller (Marvell) dating from back then. I've had FreeBSD installed and running on this machine back in the sysinstall days.
Click to expand...

Marvell's SATA controllers are a hit and miss in FreeBSD. If you have an option (BIOS option) to switch the controller to AHCI mode it will probably work, in the normal mode the controller needs a special driver to work and some models of the Marvell controllers just don't work on FreeBSD in that mode because the programming information is not available from the vendor.
 
Thanks! Changing to AHCI mode was indeed the fix. I recall changing from AHCI to IDE mode some time ago after reading that the Samsung supposedly was faster with the Marvell controller in that mode, but then 3G vs. 6G SATA is not likely going to be the limiting factor on a 2010 vintage machine anyway.
 
The IDE mode is needed only for some really old and arcane operating systems that have no AHCI drivers in any form, you almost always benefit from using AHCI mode over IDE.
 
Note that your Windows 10 might blue-screen with a STOP error if you switch to AHCI. The reason is that during installation all other storage controller drivers are disabled. So when you change the controller type Windows won't have a working controller driver. The trick is to enable the driver first, then switch the controller type in the BIOS.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/922976
 
I did wonder if Win10 would be OK, but thankfully it's working fine.

The deal with IDE IIRC was that the Marvell AHCI driver (for the specific chip in the Rampage III) doesn't support 6G with the 840, but there was a Samsung speedup available that conflicted with Marvell's AHCI. I stopped using the Samsung speedup long ago (never made any difference I could see), but never remembered to go back to AHCI mode.
 
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