booting troubles from HD

[Christian Baer]

Hello there, dear readers! :-)

I am having slight trouble booting FreeBSD *after* installing it to the HDs.

This is a Sun Ultra 60, 2 CPUs (450MHz), 2gigs of RAM, 2 Seagate Cheetah
74gig drives (these full-height things). There is no monitor, no
keyboard and no mouse connected. All installing is done via a serial
console. I am going to use this machine as a mail and news server, since
the old one is kinda busted and this old workstation is too good to be a
door stop. :-) Because of the stuff it will be doing, it won't need to
be accessed directly, ssh is a great tool.

Installing isn't really a problem, everything works fine - apart from
the actual booting from the HDs. Booting from CD works fine - otherwise
I wouldn't have been able to install FreeBSD. But somehow, there is no
/boot/loader. I was never asked if I wanted to install a boot loader or
anything after partitioning the disks - although I am not sure if this
question really applies to SPARC64. I last installed FreeBSD on a Sun
while 6.x was the production version. That went smoothly. I only tried
7.x briefly because it didn't work properly[1] with my machine. Apart
from the problems I had with it, 7.0 ran smoothly too. Now I'm trying
8.0 out to see if things have gotten better. :-)

There is one quirk about this installation:
I put / on the second HD (da1). The reason is because I want to encrypt
/usr /var and /tmp with geli(8), so I used the partition I had set aside
for /var/spool/news to accomodate / until I've set up the encrypted file
systems.

I tried to add a seperate file system for /boot on the da0, in case that
was the problem. Unfortunately that didn't do the trick either.

This is what happens, when I try to boot:

Sun Ultra 60 UPA/PCI (2 X UltraSPARC-II 450MHz), No Keyboard
OpenBoot 3.27, 2048 MB memory installed, Serial #15069787.
Ethernet address 8:0:20:e5:f2:5b, Host ID: 80e5f25b.

{0} ok boot disk0
Boot device: /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/disk at 0,0  File and args:

>> FreeBSD/sparc64 boot block
   Boot path:   /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/disk at 0,0:a
   Boot loader: /boot/loader
File /boot/loader not found
Program terminated

Is there something I have missed? I didn't find anything special in the
handbook or errata concerning this.

Best regards,
Chris

[1] http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-geom/2008-May/002905.html