installation of FreeBSD 4.10 on Dell PowerEdge 650 fails after reboot with mountroot

[Kevin D. Kinsey, DaleCo, S.P.]

Spumonti wrote:

<snip>

>The disk is a Seagate 120GB and it's actually ad4, not ad0.  If I
>interrupt the boot process at:
>
>  
>
>>>FreeBSD/i386 BOOT
>>>      
>>>
>Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel
>boot:
>
>and enter:
>
>  
>
>>>FreeBSD/i386 BOOT
>>>      
>>>
>Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel
>boot: 0:ad(4,a)/kernel
>
>the machine will boot properly.   I've tried two things I found while
>checking on this:
>
>1.  Adding to loader.conf:
>rootdev="disk4s1a"
>root_disk_unit=0"
>
>2.  Rebuilding the kernel and adding:
>options        ROOTDEVNAME=\"ufs:ad4s1a\"
>
>
>Neither of which worked.    Is there something I'm missing while doing
>the installation?   If I look in  /dev   the devices are there ad4,
>ad4s1, ad4s1a, ad4s1b, etc.
>
>About at wit's end ... any help would be great.
>  
>

Is this the only disk in the box?  Why is it ad4 instead of ad0?
That's at issue, but maybe it's not as bad as pulling out your hair...

It might be possible to "fix it" without changing disk numbers
by adding the following to /boot/loader.conf:

        set root_disk_unit=4
        boot /kernel

See loader(8) for details.

That said, I'm no expert on loader(8) et al.  But that's what the
docs say, anyway.

HTH,

Kevin Kinsey
DaleCo, S.P.