Stuck in bootstrapping hell - how do I troubleshoot?

[Chris Zumbrunn]

On Apr 24, 2005, at 9:24 AM, Chris Zumbrunn wrote:

> On Apr 23, 2005, at 3:54 PM, Chris Zumbrunn wrote:
>
>> On Apr 23, 2005, at 1:27 PM, <bob at a1poweruser.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Turn off power management in PC bios and try again.
>>
>> Thanks, I'll try that.
>
> [...]
> As soon as someone goes to the datacenter, we'll see what the console 
> is saying and we'll try disabling the power management in the bios 
> (can't do that remotely either).
>

Someone went by the datacenter and checked this out.

When attempting to boot, the machine seemed to hang at the time when it 
should find/look for an MBR - it didn't report anything.

The only power management setting we could find in the bios that seemed 
related, was an ACPI related enable/disable flag. After disabling that 
we still experienced the same hang.

We also tried to boot just from one disk (ad0) after disabling the 
RAID1 (ar0). And we reinstalled the MBR/bootstrap code on the ad0 and 
ad2 disks but still couldn't get them to boot.

Then we switched the disks with those from another (identical) machine 
and repeated the setup. This time it worked fine and FreeBSD is booting 
now. The other disks now work fine as well, but are running debian in 
the other machine.

Unfortunately, I again don't know what I did differently (nothing, I 
believe). Maybe I'll figure it out the next time it happens. Any ideas 
what it could have been or what else I should have checked?

/czv