work-around for 5.2 on SOYO raid.

[A1-Vegas.com "Zeke"]

please forward to the appropriate people.

problem: sysinstall in CDimage cannot write to HPT raid

work around:
installation procedure freeBSD 5.2
soyo P4S Dragon ultra.

1. plug one of the hard drives into IDE1
2. install freeBSD onto drive.
3. edit /etc/fstab, change drives to ar0s1a ar0s1b ...etc.
4. power down and re-plug drive into IDE3, plug empty drive into IDE4.
5. set cmos to boot on SCSI
6. run ^H setting tool, create mirror, and duplicate drive 1 to empty drive.
7. freeBSD will now boot from the array.

these steps should not be necessary, but the installer was unable to
write to the hpt raid, even thopugh it was successfully probed.

after moving the hard drive to the raid array the boot loader would run
from the hard drive, and the raid was successfully probed, but the boot
loader was not able to translate the fstab entries to the new environment.

may i humbly suggest adding this capability, possibly with an operator
confirmation.

the purpose of mirrioring is to allow fast recovery from system failures,
the ability of the loader to discover it's new environment serves that end.

thanks ...zeke

P.S. the soyo motherboard makes a great hard drive cloner, too.  ..Z