sym: where did my drives go?

[Per olof Ljungmark]

Aaron D. Gifford wrote:
> Per olof Ljungmark (peo at intersonic.se) said:
>> I'm assembling a Compaq 1850R with attached storage system. For the 
>> built in scsi controller, there are three drives internally on channel 
>> 1 + 5 drives externally on channel 2.
>> During boot, I can see all disks being identified first by the machine 
>> itself and then in the early part of the process, by the kernel 
>> (something scrolls by talking about BIOS drive numbering).
>>
>> However, the result is not 8 drives but 5 in total in a mix between 
>> the channels, see below.
>>
> 
> 
> We ran into a perhaps similar problem with 4.8-RELEASE and 4.8-STABLE 
> when we attempted to upgrade an old Compaq Proliant machine on Friday. 
> Under 4.7, the sym driver would see all 5 SCSI drives.  But after a 
> CVSupdate and build/install of world and reboot, the machine failed to 
> boot because the first drive, the root drive, was no longer visible to 
> the kernel.  The FreeBSD boot loader could still see the drive, but the 
> kernel would never detect it.
> 
> At first we couldn't figure out what was going wrong.  After some hours 
> including an attempt to install 4.8-RELEASE on another drive that also 
> failed because of the disappearing drive problem, we reinstalled 
> 4.7-RELEASE and have been running RELENG_4_7 since.  I think our old 
> system uses the NCR 875 chipset.
> 
> Anyone know what changes between 4.7 and 4.8 to sym might be responsible 
> for the disappearing drive trick?

Just to confirm:

We installed 4.7-RELEASE on same machine and all drives are identified 
correctly.

Perhaps one should starrt a thread in -STABLE...

Per olof