sym: where did my drives go?

[Aaron D. Gifford]

Per olof Ljungmark (peo at intersonic.se) said:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm assembling a Compaq 1850R with attached storage system. For the 
> built in scsi controller, there are three drives internally on channel 1 
> + 5 drives externally on channel 2.
> During boot, I can see all disks being identified first by the machine 
> itself and then in the early part of the process, by the kernel 
> (something scrolls by talking about BIOS drive numbering).
> 
> However, the result is not 8 drives but 5 in total in a mix between the 
> channels, see below.
> 
> What's wrong? Do I need to make more devices? If yes, how?
> 
> Thanks,

We ran into a perhaps similar problem with 4.8-RELEASE and 4.8-STABLE 
when we attempted to upgrade an old Compaq Proliant machine on Friday. 
Under 4.7, the sym driver would see all 5 SCSI drives.  But after a 
CVSupdate and build/install of world and reboot, the machine failed to 
boot because the first drive, the root drive, was no longer visible to 
the kernel.  The FreeBSD boot loader could still see the drive, but the 
kernel would never detect it.

At first we couldn't figure out what was going wrong.  After some hours 
including an attempt to install 4.8-RELEASE on another drive that also 
failed because of the disappearing drive problem, we reinstalled 
4.7-RELEASE and have been running RELENG_4_7 since.  I think our old 
system uses the NCR 875 chipset.

Anyone know what changes between 4.7 and 4.8 to sym might be responsible 
for the disappearing drive trick?

Wondering,
Aaron out.