No /boot/loader

[freebsd at wcubed.net]

Hi all.

A little over a month ago I posted the following:

> I just installed 4.9 on a 8 x 4.3GB SCSI disk AMI MegaRAID array (RAID 5,
> 30GB).  The card's a HP NetRAID (aka AMI/LSI Enterprise 1200 or Series
> 428).  I set up slices as I have previously with 30GB+ IDE drives:
>
>  1GB    swap
> 29GB    /
>
> Fdisk, label and the rest of install went fine, but on reboot I get the
> following error:
>
> Disk error 0x1 (lba=0x21fc09f)
> No /boot/loader
>
>>> FreeBSD/i386 BOOT
> Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel
> boot:
>
>
> If I hit enter, it spits out this error:
>
>
> WARNING: loader(8) metadata is missing!
>
>
> and starts the boot process.  After finding all the devices, including the
> RAID controller (amr0) and the logical drive (amrd0), it displays a
> 'mountroot>' prompt.  If I give it the logical drive slice a:
> (ufs:/dev/amrd0s1a) it finishes the boot.

Over the last few days I've added some new drives in RAID0 configuration
and installed 4.10-RELEASE, and had the identical problem.

I got around the problem by doing two things:

1.  Created a /boot.config containing "0:da(0,a)/kernel"

After doing this, the boot2 stopped complaining about a missing /boot/loader.

2.  Built a new kernel and defined ROOTDEVNAME=\"ufs:amrd0s1a\"

Now I'm no longer prompted to specify the root slice.

So things are good.  My machine boots w/out interaction.

But I'm still perplexed as to why it didn't before.  If boot2 can find
/kernel, why can't it find /boot/loader?

I copied /boot/loader to / and changed /boot.config to '0:da(0,a)/loader'
and whaddya know?  It now runs the BTX loader properly.

So what's going on?  Can anyone answer this stumper?

Thanks again,

Brad

(CC me please, I'm not subbed)