Hi-

It's my understanding that (relatively) recent changes in the i386
bootblocks allow booting from a RAID1 set, and I've looked over
the appropriate section in the NetBSD guide, but I'm having no luck
with booting.

Here's my setup:  I have a 2-disk RAID1 which is fully functional
except for booting.  Here's the relevant part of the disklabel:

16 partitions:
#        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
 a:  39102273        63       RAID                     # (Cyl.      0*-  38791)
 c:  39102273        63     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0*-  38791)
 d:  39102336         0     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0 -  38791)

It's the same on both disks, wd0 and wd1.  In case it matters, here's the
disklabel from the raid set:

16 partitions:
#        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
 a:  37004288        63     4.2BSD   1024  8192 46608  # (Cyl.      0*-  36137*)
 b:   2097857  37004351       swap                     # (Cyl.  36137*-  38185*)
 c:  39102145        63     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0*-  38185*)
 d:  39102208         0     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0 -  38185*)

Now, the way this got set up was I created the RAID set after netbooting,
then used a new 2.0_BETA INSTALL kernel (with raid support) to install
the OS.  I was sort of expecting boot problems, so when the set didn't
boot after the install, I manually put bootblocks on as follows:

/usr/sbin/installboot -v /dev/rwd0a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1
File system:         /dev/rwd0a
File system type:    ffs (blocksize 8192, needswap 0)
Primary bootstrap:   /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1
Preserving 51 (0x33) bytes of the BPB
# ^0a^1a
/usr/sbin/installboot -v /dev/rwd1a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1
File system:         /dev/rwd1a
File system type:    ffs (blocksize 8192, needswap 0)
Primary bootstrap:   /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1
Preserving 51 (0x33) bytes of the BPB

...but still no dice.

Looking more closely at all this, the only difference I can see between
my setup and the one in the NetBSD guide is that /dev/raid0a begins
at 63 in my setup instead of 0 in the netbsd guide setup.  Is
this the source of the problem, or is there something else I'm
not taking into account?

Any clues appreciated...

+j

-- 
Jeff Rizzo                                         http://boogers.sf.ca.us/~riz