freebsd stable - Jun 2004 - 4.10-STABLE boot issues

Hi all.

I just installed 4.10 (and upgraded to 4.10-STABLE) on a 2 x 9GB SCSI disk
AMI MegaRAID array (RAID0).  I set up slices as I have previously with
30GB+ IDE drives:

 1GB    swap
29GB    /

Fdisk, label and the rest of install went fine, as did the update, but on
all reboots (even before the update) I got the following error:

Disk error 0x1 (lba=0x21fc09f)
No /boot/loader
>>> FreeBSD/i386 BOOT
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel
boot:

If I hit enter, it spit out this error:

WARNING: loader(8) metadata is missing!

and continued the boot process.  After finding all the devices, including
the RAID controller (amr0) and the logical drive (amrd0), it displayed a
'mountroot>' prompt.  If I gave it the logical drive slice a:
(ufs:/dev/amrd0s1a) it finished the boot.

I got around the problem by doing two things:

1.  Created a /boot.config containing "0:da(0,a)/kernel"

After doing this, the boot2 stopped complaining about a missing
/boot/loader, which makes sense because I'm telling it to load /kernel
instead of /boot/loader.

2.  Built a new kernel and defined ROOTDEVNAME=\"ufs:amrd0s1a\"

Now I'm no longer prompted to specify the root slice.

So things are good.  My machine boots w/out interaction.

But I'm still perplexed as to why it didn't before.  If boot2 can find
/kernel, why can't it find /boot/loader?

To further investigate, I copied /boot/loader to / and changed
/boot.config to '0:da(0,a)/loader' and whaddya know?  It now runs the
BTX
loader properly.

So what's going on?  Can anyone answer this stumper?

Thanks,

Brad

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Brad Waite wrote:
> I just installed 4.10 (and upgraded to 4.10-STABLE) on a 2 x 9GB SCSI disk
> AMI MegaRAID array (RAID0).  I set up slices as I have previously with
> 30GB+ IDE drives:
>
>  1GB    swap
> 29GB    /
>
> Fdisk, label and the rest of install went fine, as did the update, but on
> all reboots (even before the update) I got the following error:
>
> Disk error 0x1 (lba=0x21fc09f)
> No /boot/loader
>From what you got later, it looks like just /boot/loader got corrupted
somehow.  Go into src/sys/boot/i386 in your 4.10-STABLE tree and do 'make
depend && make && make install' as root. That should rebuild
& reinstall
loader.
> 1.  Created a /boot.config containing "0:da(0,a)/kernel"
Make sure you remove this when you get loader rebuilt.
> To further investigate, I copied /boot/loader to / and changed
> /boot.config to '0:da(0,a)/loader' and whaddya know?  It now runs
the BTX
> loader properly.
>
> So what's going on?  Can anyone answer this stumper?
Is /boot on /? :-)

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite@gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org