7.0RC1 install to amr RAID array fails

[Tom Haapanen]

OK, I'm stumped. We run an (almost) all-FreeBSD site, with the only 
exception being the MySQL server; it has been running Fedora due to the 
better Linux threading performance. I have been unhappy with both the 
management tools on Linux (not the same ...) and the reliability of the 
ext3 filesystem, so with the appearance of FreeBSD 7.0, I saw the 
opportunity to move back to FreeBSD for the database as well.

The setup?

    * FreeBSD 7.0 RC1 amd64
    * Dual Opteron 2216 (dual core)
    * 6 GB of memory
    * LSI Logic MegaRAID 320-2
    * 4x 36GB SCSI in a RAID-5 array (plus two hot spares)

Booting from a bootonly CD, the system happily starts sysinstall, and I 
can go through the installation steps, partitioning the primary and only 
disk (amrd0) and creating the filesystems. When I begin the commit step, 
the filesystem appears to get created correctly.

However, once sysinstall begins downloading the packages using FTP, it 
fails to write them with a "unable to write data - file system full" 
error (the root file system was configured as 2 GB).

Using the Alt+F4 emergency shell, I am able to cd to /bin, but little 
else. It does appear that the file system does exist, though. I have 
used the MegaRAID BIOS to ensure that the logical volume is consistent, 
and have re-initialized it, but with no difference.  Unfortunately I'm 
doing the install on the console, not serial, so I have no dmesg log to 
share.

I do recall using the amr driver with an HP NetRAID card with an earlier 
version of FreeBSD (possibly 5.x), but I can't remember whether it was 
the boot device, like it is here.

Can anyone offer suggestions for wrestling down this problem?

Thanks ...

Tom Haapanen
tomh at motorsport.com