On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 02:35:44AM +0200, Zbigniew Baniewski wrote:
>Does there exist a special setting in the kernel config file? Or perhaps
>it's described somewhere (FAQ, HOWTO, Guide...)?

I experienced a very similar problem as yours, then hw bugs and
failure made life worse, for me.

My situation is a little different, I wanted to have my root on
an ATA drive; and use SATA drives for removable storage. Since
the SATA drives are counted before ATA drives, if I don't have
exactly the same number SATA drives at each boot, my root ATA
drive gets renumbered and I have to go and change fstab manually;
which can be difficult.  Unless you do it regularly, the kernel
config adjustments look tricky and time consuming to get right.

Anyway, I got lots of help from one of the netbsd lists (tech-kern?)
and clearly the best solution is something of a hack; but is reported
to work well. I believe it will work for me when I put some personal
obligations behind me and finish dealing with the hw bugs and failures.

Solution: setup your disks in a one half raid mirror
configuration, then the kernel uses the raid id to mount
partitions where they belong, regardless of their numbering.

The fact that the mirror is incomplete is of no consequence
(kernel thinks half the mirror failed); but you could add a disk
to the setup, let the kernel rebuild the mirror, then take half
the mirror out, for offline backup.

Wish I could provide more technical details but I've not worked
through it myself, yet.

// George


-- 
George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator <IXOYE><
http://galis.org/ cell:646-331-2027 mailto:george@galis.org