Why won't FreeBSD boot from hard drive??

[Kevin Kinsey]

Aaron VanAlstine wrote:
> I successfully loaded FreeBSD 6.0 from CD all the way until the system
> reboots; however, the computer seems regard the DVD/CD as the boot hard
> drive and is trying to boot from that. During boot-up it auto detects the
> DVD ROM as the Pri Master, and the two HDs as 3rd and 4th Master. When it
> gets to the boot-stage, I get a message ³Reboot and Select proper Boot
> device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key.²
> According to the BIOS setup utility, the 1st boot device is Intel Striped
> RAID. Yet, when I restart  and hit F8 to select the BBS popup menu, it
> appears that the DVD is still the boot device. I change it to the HD and
> re-boot and still I get the original ³Reboot and Select proper Boot device
> or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key" message.
> 
> The DVD/CD cable is connected to the blue primary IDE on the motherboard and
> the two HD are connected to SATA1 and SATA2. From the Main screen of the
> BIOS setup utility:
> 
> -- Primary IDE Master is the NEC DVD RW.
> -- Primary IDE Slave Not Detected,
> -- IDE Configuration is RAID (OnBoard Serial-ATA BOOTROM is Disabled.)
> 
> Any ideas on how I can make the system boot from the hard drive instead of
> trying the DVD/CD?
> 


I assume that you've noted the existence of a "Boot from RAID" or
similar option, and told the BIOS **not** to boot from CD/DVD?


> My hardware consists of:
> 
> ASUS P5LD2 ACPI Bios Revision 0901 motherboard


Which SATA controller chip on this board?

The reason I ask --- and this was on a Windows server, but would
apply either way:

I had a server doing something very similar --- install from CD,
then can't find its array with both hands.

Someone I read on the 'net* has a theory --- possibly confirmed,
that the next generation SATA drives take so long to spin up in
some cases that the motherboard's BIOS times out waiting on them.
He claims this to be the case with Seagate and Maxtor SATA-II
drives (especially those with "Native Command Queueing" or similar
technology).

The board in question was an Epox board with the NVidia NForce 4
SATA RAID controller.  Since this board also had a Silicon Image
RAID contoller, we tried that and had some success.

Since we still wanted to use the "primary" SATA controller, we
contacted our HDD manufacturer and received firmware updates
for the drives.  After this, they've been quite reliably booting
for a few days now.

Kevin Kinsey

* Try googling first.  IIRC, forum posts on several forums,
nick might have been "RobertP" or some such...