Bootup Problem 4.8-Stable

[John Straiton]

I have a machine that was working fine but then upon reboot one day it
failed to come up on it's own. I tinkered a little bit and then finally
just settled on trying a make world/kernel. Upon retrying it this
morning I see this right after it detected the CDRom drive (same error
as before):

Apr 15 13:26:28 init: login_getclass: unknown class 'daemon'
/etc/rc: Can't open /etc/rc: No such file or directory
Apr 15 13:26:28 init: /etc/spwd.db: No such file or directory
Enter full pathname of shell or RETURN for /bin/sh:

Then I just 
#/sbin/mount /dev/da0s1f /etc
#/sbin/mount -a
#exit

And we're back up and running.

Ideas? I couldn't find an example of this question actually being
answered (tho' it's been brought up before) in the list yet. The only
one that seemed answered involved someone who had put /etc on another
drive but as you can see:

/dev/da0s1a                291M   105M   162M    39%    /
/dev/da0s1f                7.1G    26M   6.5G     0%    /etc

Same drive.

Thanks in advance,

John Straiton
jks at clickcom.com
Clickcom, Inc
704-365-9970x101