Weird boot problem

[Doug Hardie]

I had to move a bunch of servers to a new location yesterday.  That was an interesting exercise.  However, two of the systems exhibited the same behavior when first booted at the new facility.  The message gptboot: could not find on 0(ad2).  I believe I recall this correctly.  A search on that message indicated that there should be another word between find and on like kernel or loader.  There was nothing there on either system.  The system appeared to reboot after that message as there were a couple other messages and then that message reappeared.  I believe all of the systems are MBR formatted.  I don't believe any are new enough to support GPT.

Given that there were other systems coming up at that time, I left them till the end.  Nothing seemed to change anything.  In desperation we power cycled one of them and it booted properly with no error messages. Not being on site, I didn't see what was done to the other, but I suspect it was a power cycle and then it came up.  There was no identifiable corruption on either system.  I am a bit fearful of rebooting them again.

Any ideas what might have caused this and is it something telling me go get new systems?