All:

  We have a large number of non-dangerously-dedicated disks that,
  given previous discussion, should be easily updated from 6.3->8.

  These are 8th gen Dell PE18/2850 systems with MFI/LSI amr(4):
  PERC4

  Once loaded, sysinstall sees zero partitions in the
  curses-based partition editor.

  At the emergency shell, /dev/amrd0, /dev/amrd0a -> /dev/amrd0g are
  visible.

  In the 6.3 OS installed, these are all mapped as /dev/amrd0s1{a->g}

  So perhaps amrd(4) volumes don't follow the rules.  What makes
  this breakage truly exciting

  If you create a new set of partitions sysinstall, then
  slice them, and commit, the newfs/fdisk step fails
  and creates:

 /dev/amrd0as1, /dev/armd0as1a -> /dev/armd0as1g

 Then it creates:

 /dev/amrd0cs1, /dev/armd0cs1a -> /dev/armd0cs1g

 Finally it creates:

  /dev/amrd0s1, /dev/armd0s1a -> /dev/armd0s1g

 None of which are usable.

  You can see the result of booting a FixIt image after a failed
  sysinstall process:

http://digitalfreaks.org/~lavalamp/fbsd8_amr_sysinstall_butchered_partitions.jpg

  So that means its time to DBAN the volume for 30 seconds
  and/or re-init the RAID volume in the BIOS menu to nuke the
  partition table, hence a force reformat during upgrade.

  We wouldn't mind that if we were forcing everyone to use
  GPT and ZFS as defaults, but since FreeBSD 8 really changes
  nothing substantial this seems broken.

DBAN+++

~BAS


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