Re: latest current fails to mount root

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost>]

> I just rebuilt current for i386 and updated two notebooks.  One is
> fine, and the other won't boot, failing to find the root partition.
> (current from a week ok worked fine.)  It printed something about mbr
> partition extending beyond physical disk size after the kernel had
> probed devices, and was then in 'choose root device' mode.  I
> couldn't find the msg in the source so will boot it again and get the
> exact message.

I recently ran into what is very probably the same issue.  For reasons
irrelevant here, I took a disk from a machine with a perfectly ordinary
SCSI card, with a working install on it, and put it on a machine with a
SCSI "hardware" (almost certainly really firmware) RAID card.  The RAID
card saw the disk and (auto)configured it JBOD; the bootblocks worked
and booted the kernel - but then the kernel whined about the MBR
partition extending past the end of the drive (I don't recall the exact
message, and some source grepping has failed to turn it up) and
wouldn't let me specify anything on that disk as root.  Sounds very
much like your symptoms.

I can understand a warning, but I think outright refusing to let
someone even attempt to use the disk under these circumstances
is...well, I'm having toruble calling it anything weaker than "broken".

If it would help I can probably reproduce it sometime this week.

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