FreeBSD boot menu is missing

[Peter Steele]

>So what you do, instead, is make sure there is a little space left over
>at the end of the slice that you create in the first step.  Then, once
>gmirror is available, you gmirror label the slice, then gmirror insert
>the corresponding slice on the other disk(s), and gmirror rebuild.  No
>copying involved; gmirror takes care of it all.
>
>The key here is that 'gmirror label' is non-destructive as long as the
>last sector on the provider is unused.

The problem is I was unable to get multiple slices defined in a sysinstall config script. I tried many variations of parameters to pump into diskPartitionEditor and diskLabelEditor so that we could create three slices during the install but I couldn't find anything that worked. So I ended up having to create a single full disk slice to install the OS onto, and then in a post commit step slice the disks up as we want them and copy the OS over. I couldn't find a single example how to create multiple slices in a sysinstall config file. If you know how to do this, I'd love to see it. 

>It does, AFAIK, even on SATA, provided the controller supports it and is
>configured correctly.

With the proper controller and drive, yes, FreeBSD does support hot swap, to a point. Let's say for example that you have a file system mounted on a drive and that drive dies. You can pull it and put in a new one, but FreeBSD will not let you unmount the file system on the original drive. Even umount -f fails. We have to reboot to get the old mount point released, and we haven't found any way around this.