First, appologies for poor formatting as I currently have to use my ISP's webmail interface.
The machine that functions as my file server has developed a strange fault. When the ambient temperature drops too low, it "freaks out", spontaneously rebooting or just getting wedged. The recent winter storms have provoked this behavior and while it manages to operate long enough to rebuild parity on the RAID and do a full fsck of all file systems, it generally won't complete multiuser boot. So, I'm looking to migrate its accessories and disks to another, similar machine which has so-far been reliable in low temperatures (the room in my house where they are located is unheated in winter but air-conditioned in hot weather). Reading raidctl(8), it appears that so long as I enable Autoconfiguration, I should be able to move the disks without concern for which device they end up as in the new machine. (I had Autoconfig enabled in the past, but early netbsd-9 had problems with the SiI SATA card and MSI, so disabled Autoconfig during testing and recovery.) I'm not concerned too much about disks attached to the SiI card, but plan to map out which on-board SATA connector corresponds with which disk in each machine. The current system supports AHCI mode and each connector shows up as its own atabus with a single drive each. The proposed replacement machine treats the SATA connectors in pairs with each pair (drive 0,1) on an atabus. Also, due to the use of the SiI card, the disks attached to it show up as wd0-3, the disk on the on-board PATA interface becomes wd4 and the disks on the SATA connectors are wd5-8. Has anyone else migrated their RAIDframe disks to another machine with possibly different controller arrangement, possibly even from SATA to SAS? Is enabling Autoconfig the answer? Thanks for your input. -- John D. Baker
