pfSense (FreeBSD) Thinkpad Boot Failure

Posted in Technical on May 15th, 2016 by p14nd4

After pfSense upgraded to a newer FreeBSD base (perhaps a year ago), my Thinkpad T41 running pfSense was failing to boot; I believe the errors were something about failing to initialize the device at ata1 (the optical drive); perhaps something about failing to respond to a command. After lots of searching (and poor documentation), I resolved the issue by setting this boot parameter:

hint.ata.1.disabled=1

Once the system booted, I believe I added this to /boot/loader.conf.local to make the fix [slightly more] permanent. (I believe this file still gets wiped out during system updates, so it’s not a perfect solution.)

I’ll update this post with the exact error message if I encounter it again. (I’m finally getting around to writing this post since I’m about to wipe pfSense and try OPNsense, and I don’t want to have to re-discover this solution.)

Edit: As I suspected, OPNsense has the same problem:

(ataprobe0:ata1:0:1:0): ATAPI_IDENTIFY. ACB: a1 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00
(ataprobe0:ata1:0:1:0): CAM status: Command timeout
(ataprobe0:ata1:0:1:0): Retrying command
(ataprobe0:ata1:0:1:0): ATAPI_IDENTIFY. ACB: a1 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00
(ataprobe0:ata1:0:1:0): CAM status: Command timeout
(ataprobe0:ata1:0:1:0): Error 5, Retries exhausted

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