pfSense (FreeBSD) Thinkpad Boot Failure
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