GAG not booting FreeBSD from SATA drive

[graedus]

FYI, when trying to boot FreeBSD 8-RELEASE from GAG (1st and only SATA drive, 4th slice, ad4s4a), I get:

Invalid partition
Invalid partition
No /boot/loader
boot:

then I pass:

0:ad(4,4,a)/boot/kernel/kernel

First line I get is:

WARNING: loader(8) metadata is missing!

Then the loading proceeds normally, until trying to mount root, to which I need to pass:

UFS:/dev/ad4s4a

My guess is that old GAG still tries to look at ad0, and the boot fails. I had to go back to the standard bootloader in the meantime.

I refuse to recompile a generic kernel just to pass ATA_STATIC_ID's

I'd prefer not to use GRUB or LILO. Any suggestions for straightfwd bootloaders (like gag) are welcome.

 

[zeiz]

I use GAG for a few years, currently to boot one of 2 SATA drives.
When you enter GAG's setup by pressing "S" it gives a possibility to Delete an OS and to Add an OS. Choose "A" (add) your are given with a list of partitions with short description like "083 Linux" "165 FreeBSD/..." Choosing relevant FreeBSD partition always leads to correct boot. Problem you described may arise with Linux if it doesn't have its grub on its /boot partition (was installed to MBR only). But for FreeBSD - always fine except the case when you changed partition table leaving same entries in GAG. Try first to delete (from GAG of course ) all the OSs and install them again.

Another problem I believe may take place is that FreeBSD was installed on 4th (most remote) partition. There is a thread here with similar problem. Do you mind to post your partition setup here?