Can't boot new disk unless it's on the 2nd IDE channel

[Joe in MPLS]

Should have included this the first time:

When the disk is on the first channel, the BIOS reports and "invalid 
partition table" then the boot loader runs anyway until I end up at a 
"mountroot>" prompt. Whatever I try to enter at the prompt I'm told the 
disk doesn't exist. It doesn't matter which disk my fstab mount points say.

If I have the disk on the second channel it boots just fine regardless 
of whether there's a disk on the first channel or not.

          ..jgm




Joe in MPLS wrote:
> Several months ago I bought a bigger (IDE) disk and set about the task 
> of moving a FreeBSD 6.1 STABLE #0 system to teh new disk. I did the 
> fdisk, boot0cfg and bsdlabel stuff and dumps piped to restores to get 
> all the bytes moved. I thought all was well so I got lazy and never 
> removed the old disk.
>
> After doing an update this week via make buildworld etc, I realized 
> that the box was still booting from the old small drive and loading an 
> old kernel before mounting everything mentioned in /etc/fstab.
>
> I used fdisk to make the 1st slice of teh new disk active, edited 
> fstab to change all the ad2s1x entries to ad0s1x, disconnected the 
> first drive and moved the new drive to the first IDE channel. No joy.
>
> I used bsdlabel -e to change my "/" partition from ad2s1d to ad2s1a 
> (sysinstall disklabel would not let me assign "a" to a partition on 
> the second disk). Still no joy and worse, it wouldn't boot even with 
> the first disk in place.
>
> I managed to get it booting with both drives installed again, but now 
> it wants my fstab entries to be "ad2a", "ad2e" etc. It doesn't like 
> the "ad2s1x" stuff in there any more. Then for the heck of it, I 
> disconnected the first drive, left the new drive on the second channel 
> and it booted just fine!
>
> here's fdisk output:
>
> [root at shorty ~]# fdisk
> ******* Working on device /dev/ad2 *******
> parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
> cylinders=119705 heads=16 sectors/track=255 (4080 blks/cyl)
>
> Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
> parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
> cylinders=119705 heads=16 sectors/track=255 (4080 blks/cyl)
>
> Media sector size is 512
> Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
> Information from DOS bootblock is:
> The data for partition 1 is:
> <UNUSED>
> The data for partition 2 is:
> <UNUSED>
> The data for partition 3 is:
> <UNUSED>
> The data for partition 4 is:
> sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
>    start 0, size 50000 (24 Meg), flag 80 (active)
>        beg: cyl 0/ head 0/ sector 1;
>        end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63
>
> I don't know why part #4 is active when I marked #1 active earlier 
> tonight... and the disk is way bigger than 24 MB as shown by df -h:
> [root at shorty ~]# df -h
> Filesystem    Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/ad2a     1.9G    191M    1.6G    10%    /
> devfs         1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
> /dev/ad2e     1.9G    2.4M    1.8G     0%    /tmp
> /dev/ad2g     176G    7.8G    154G     5%    /usr
> /dev/ad2f      44G    558M     40G     1%    /var
> devfs         1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /var/named/dev
>
> and here's bsdlabel:
>
> [root at shorty ~]# bsdlabel ad2
> # /dev/ad2:
> 8 partitions:
> #        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
>  a:  4194304        0    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552
>  b:  4194304  4194304      swap
>  c: 488397168        0    unused        0     0         # "raw" part, 
> don't edit
>  e:  4194304  8388608    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552
>  f: 94371840 12582912    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552
>  g: 381442416 106954752    4.2BSD     2048 16384 28552
>
> How do I make this "ad0" instead of "ad2"?
>
>             TIA   ...jgm
>
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