Subject: Re: /boot on RAID1: "Can't open /boot"
To: Mike Frandsen <michael.frandsen@sri.com>
From: David Laight <david@l8s.co.uk>
List: netbsd-help
Date: 08/25/2007 08:59:38
On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 10:25:19PM -0600, Mike Frandsen wrote:
> I've tried to follow the instructions in "Chapter 15. NetBSD RAIDframe" 
> for booting NetBSD from RAID1.
> 
> My configuration is NetBSD 3.1 over 4 250 GB SATA drives configured with:
>  RAID1 root partition (mirroring across all 4 disks)
>  RAID5 large partition (spanning all 4 disks)
> 
> The error I'm getting when trying to boot the system is:
> Boot failed (errno  2): Can't open /boot
> 
> I thought the main tricks were:
> * make sure there's a partition visible with fdisk and marked active
> * make sure / is only RAID1 (since RAID5 not supported for root 
> filesystem at boot time)
> * make sure / starts at the beginning of the RAID partition
> * make sure RAID is configured to set "root" and "autoconfig" (-A root)
> * run installboot for all bootable disks
> * based on the error message, I've double-checked the "/boot" file and 
> ensured it is the same as in /usr/mdec

Seems about right.
 
> I can boot off a CD and mount the RAID partitions so I know RAID is 
> working and the filesystems are ok.
> 
> Is there something I'm missing or anything else I should try?  Are there 
> any peculiarities with RAID1 mirroring across all 4 disks instead of just 2?

Not relevant to the boot code, it doesn't actually know anything about
the raid setup, it has a 'hack' to look an additional 64 sectors down
the disk for the root filesystem.

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk