freebsd stable - May 2003 - Recent 4.8-STABLE & Compaq Proliant System drive issues

Howdy all. We're experiencing some difficulties encountered from a new 
build/install world/kernel on a Compaq Proliant machine we have.

We were running fine under 4.7-STABLE, and updated the sources to 4.8-STABLE 
last night (5/8/03), built and installed. This morning after a reboot, we got a 
horrid error to the likes of:
Error mounting root. Error no 22.

We encountered this error earlier this week on -CURRENT, but it has since been 
fixed. However, I haven't seen any GEOM MFC's, so I'm not sure what
the problem
is.

Anyway, we were able to boot with a floppy that happily loads the boot block 
and loader, and gladly loads the kernel (and doing 'ls' from the loader
prompt
shows the root partition just fine, and 'show' in the loader prompt 
shows 'currdev=disk1s1a) but once the kernel waits for SCSI devices to
settle,
the system drive (there are 5 devices on the SCSI bus, 0 thru 4) vanishes 
(device 0), thus moving devices 1-4 down and becoming 0-3.

This is a problem, as drives 1-4 (or 0-3 now), were a vinum RAID5 array. There 
is no valid root partition on that array, and since the kernel can't see the
REAL drive 0 (da0 or bios disk1) anymore (the loader could), it can't see
the
root partition.

These Compaq Proliants don't have a real BIOS configuration without
installing
a DOS partition on your system drive, so you just can't set the boot device
to
IDE. 

The 4.8 kernel recognizies the proliant's SCSI as a sym0 and sym1 devices
(875
is in parenthesis, and I believe it's the chipset number).

Question being, anybody experienced anything similar with Compaq proliants not 
seeing the system disk when booting from a floppy or the primary system disk 
(SCSI)?  We're going to try and rever to an older kernel (4.7) and see if 
anything remarkable happens, but I'd like to probe the waters and see if 
anybody has any other ideas.

Thanks for any and all suggestions/help.

Cassidy.