installed FreeBSD to USB disk and it doesn't boot

Ok, the situation is this: I am testing a USB install media which I cannot test on virtual machines and none I know of support emulation of USB sticks as boot devices. So I am using my laptop, however I don't want to change the OS on the internal HDD so I have a WD Raptor connected via a USB to SATA adapter. Every other OS has no issues booting off the raptor except freebsd FreeBSD.

Here is what happens. I can use the HDD inside mfsbsd booted of the USB stick. I can copy files to it etc. and have installed the OS on it. Last night all was fine and I could boot off of it.

Today the boot loader comes up and then it loads the kernel, so I see all the detected devices going by on the screen but when it comes to the mount root file system it fails. I can see the detected devices and the USB HDD is missing. So it seems during the boot sequence the USB is either not detected or is disconnecting. To support the latter theory if I then reboot the laptop the HDD isn't detected on boot and I have to reboot a second time as it seems it has to reinitialize.

So I thought what was changed? Today I had unplugged the USB memory stick with mfsbsd on it. I plug it back in and the HDD is detected during the dmesg stage and the root filesystem mounts on boot.

Any thoughts?

I am using labels in fstab so this is not down to the device number changing, it actually isn't detected at all without the USB memory stick in as well.
 
Do you have longer timeouts set in /boot/loader.conf?
Code:
kern.cam.boot_delay=10000
kern.cam.scsi_delay=10000
 
I haven't tested what you said because I put 9.0 on there now and that doesn't have the issue, so it's an issue on 8.3 only not 9.0. I will probably at some point whack 8.3 back on and then test what you said so I can report back.
 
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