Thanks, that does work. I was then able to create a SCSI mirror with two drives using softraid, refer to that new volume by DUID in /etc/fstab, and see the machine automatically mount the volume on boot.
Is there a way to pass a root device to bsd during the boot process? I don't find one in the man pages for boot (which is actually the i386 man page). I suppose I can have openfirmware boot bsd -a and I can type the device whenever it reboots. I'm eager to hear any other ideas you may have. At any rate, this will do for now, and I can continue to use this as a NAS and migrate files to the new volume. It probably later makes sense for me to use an i386 based NAS rather than using this machine. In addition to this limitation in booting, I've found there are quite a few SATA expansion cards that will not work and that not all the SATA ports are recognized on the cards that do work. Ideally I'd like to have 10-20 sata ports I can continue to add drives to. Thanks. On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 11:53 PM, Hugo Villeneuve <harpa...@jwales.eintr.net> wrote: > On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 10:24:17PM -0500, Justin Haynes wrote: >> misc - >> >> What I don't understand is why the kernel would try to mount a >> partition not specified in /etc/fstab. > > The root partition is special. It must be mounted before anything > on it can be read. On each platform OpenBSD runs on, there is an > attempt to recuperate the low level drive name as seen by the > hardware boot code into an OpenBSD device name. (Like on i386, you > boot on "hd" devices that ends up into a wd or sd device.) > >> >> Is the kernel assuming root should be on the same disk it was booted >> from, and inferring where root should be based on the bootpath?: >> >> scsibus2 at softraid0: 256 targets >> bootpath: /pci@f20000000/mac-io@17/ata-4@1F000/disk@0:/bsd >> root on wd0a swap on wd0b dump on wd0b >> panic: root filesystem has size 0 > > It's been a while since I started my eMac, but I would have expected > that the full bootpath, as provided by OpenFirmware, to be mapped > to the right device. > > Strange. > > Anyhow, I would try from the OpenFirware to add the -a flag to the > boot command (replace the device name with the apropriate name): > > boot ultra0:,ofwboot /bsd -a > > If that works (no idea if it will), you should get an extra prompt > that ask for a root device, type "wd1a". > > You might be lucky and it might work. If it does, I got more ideas. > >> >> This is my only guess since wd1a and wd1b would be the disks specified >> by the DUIDs in /etc/fstab. > > If you get past the initial kernel mount of the root paritition, > the rest of your /etc/fstab with DUID will work.
