USB disk boot issues

[Paul B Mahol]

On 4/1/10, Peter Steele <psteele at maxiscale.com> wrote:
> We clone systems from specially prepared USB flash sticks and this all works
> well, except that occasionally the flash stick fails to boot. It fails at
> the "mount root" step, saying that it cannot mount the specified root
> partition. We use a labeled partition on the disk to make it device
> independent, so we have something like
>
> /dev/label/usbroot  /    ufs    rw     1      1
>
> in our fstab. When it fails it doesn't recognize this device, and even ?
> doesn't list it as one of the available devices. If we reboot, it's likely
> the problem won't occur again. It seems to be some kind of timing issue. Is
> this a known problem?

Yes, it is.