Non-Fatal Errors

CF NID Not Found Error

Some newer Compact Flash cards are giving users trouble, in particular the Sandisk 4GB 30MB/s cards seem to be problematic.

The cards may function properly, but will often generate an error in the logs such as:

This normal and safe to ignore. It has nothing to do with image size, a 1 GB image can be used on a 4 GB card and they still do that. From what I’ve been able to gather on that, the cards report they have a larger usable size than they do, and when the FreeBSD ATA code initializes it tries to read the end of the disk even if its partition is nowhere near that, which the CF is reporting doesn’t actually exist, which is what that log message says.

according to ATA-7 specification, Section 6.59.6 is: “IDNF shall be set to one if a user-accessible address could not be found. IDNF shall be set to one if an address outside of the range of user-accessible addresses is requested if command aborted is not returned.” FreeBSD labels this bit as NID_NOT_FOUND

SETFEATURES Error

Newer snapshots and releases of AZTCO-FW software (after 2.0.1) also attempt to setup APM for an ATA hard drive at boot. Sometimes the detection yields a non-fatal error when trying to find if the value is supported, or when the drive claims it’s supported but can’t set it. That error is:

It should only be seen once at bootup on such systems, and can safely be ignored.