boot0 problem - strange character for default drive?

[Neil Long]

Hi

Yesterday I had a problem with a gmirror configuration and one drive  
started squeaking rather unpleasantly. If I physically remove one of  
the drives I don't get a normal boot0 screen i.e. F1 for FreeBSD and  
F5 is Drive 0 - typical for gmirror??) but some strange character  
after the 'F' - I can't find the ascii number for it but it looks like  
a capital "I" (more of an I-Beam i.e. distinct flats top and bottom)  
with a diamond in the centre. Hitting any key just gives a # and left  
to itself there is a series of '#".

I gave up and left it overnight and today I was able to boot the good  
disk and even deactivate/insert the bad disk which completed. All  
seemed fine, no errors in dmesg but on reboot - all I get is the above  
state. I tried the SATA controller on the mobo and a plug-in PCI cheap  
one (tried two). Makes no difference. It boots fine off an IDE drive.  
It boots fine using the same SATA controllers for an older non-gmirror  
drive (then I simply get the F1: FreeBSD option) so I don't think it  
is the cpu/memory/mobo?? I now have the same boot0 problem with either  
drive from the gmirror

Anyone else seen this and have a fix? I don't want to zap the drives  
since there is a working system there but just can't get to it :-)

Thanks
Neil