Bypassing boot0/1/2?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Hi, all,

I have two brand new systems on my desk with Adaptec 5404
SAS RAID cards. I booted an install CD from an USB drive
and could install on the RAID 10 just finde. Both 7.3 and
an 8.0 snapshot from April. Amd64, of course.

Now something weird happens when I boot from hard disk.

The "boot:" prompt appears to be waiting for me to hit
<Enter> unconditionally. The system does not autoboot
by itself. If I install the bootmanager (boot0cfg -B)
instead of a standard MBR, the result is the same.
The "F1" prompt times out and switches to the next stage,
then it's waiting again for me to press a key.

When I do that, the audible alarm of the RAID HA goes off
and the loading of /boot/loader and the kernel (?)
takes "forever" - around five minutes, during which the
HA beeps the entire time.

Once the FreeBSD boot menu (former "Beastie" menu) appears,
everything is silent, again, and the rest of the boot
process continues normally. The system, once booted,
is running perfectly fine.

I tried to replace the first stages of the FreeBSD
boot loader with Grub, loading /boot/loader as the next
stage - same result. I can boot any current FreeBSD
from any external device, normally - but not from
the internal RAID volume.

As I see this, I could try to skip as much as possible
of the standard boot process by using a "dangerously dedicated"
disk if that is still supported? Would there be a chance
that this might help? We used dedicated disks for years
with FreeBSD 2, 3 and 4, but stopped using them around
5, IIRC.

Or, if all else fails, I could boot everything up to /boot/loader
from a flash module and direct it to the kernel on hard disk.
Not pretty, but probably workable.

Any suggestions are very welcome.


Thanks,
Patrick
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