On Tue, 2 Jun 2009, Donald Allen wrote:

quoted text
> As I've mentioned in a previous thread, among the machines on which
> I'm running OpenBSD 4.5 is a Lenovo Thinkstation S10. 4 cores, 4 Gb
> memory, 2 146 Gb SAS disks on an LSI raid controller, arranged as a
> raid 0.
>
> Two questions:
>
> 1. In the past, running Linux, I've backed this machine up (to a sata
> drive in a usb shoebox) by booting a live- or install-cd, the idea
> being to have the system completely quiescent during the backup. I've
> been absolutely stymied in trying to do the same thing with OpenBSD.
> The install45 cd does not have enough sd* devices (the sd0 series
> only), so I can't mount both the raid 0 and the backup drive. The two
> live cds I tried (bsdanywhere and jggimi) both fail during booting,
> complaining they can't find their root filesystem. In order to get any
> flavor of OpenBSD to boot on this machine, I have to get into ukc and
> disable uhci. Thinking that might be causing this problem, I tried the
> jggimi livecd on my Thinkpad X61 (2 64-bit cores) both just letting it
> boot and doing the ukc->disable uhci sequence. In both cases, the
> system booted successfully (no problem finding the root file system on
> the ramdisk). Hopefully temporarily, I've worked around this problem
> on the workstation by booting the installed system and backing it up
> while it's running, shutting down some key things (e.g., postgresql).
> But I would like to solve this problem one way or another and be able
> to boot enough of a system from a cd to be able to run my backup
> script.

Why not use a single-user mode ( -s from boot prompt) for this?
Even Linux and FreeBSD should have it, though not as "pure".

quoted text
> 2. If I boot the install45 cd (bsd.rd) on the workstation (after
> disabling uhci in ukc) and run reboot from the shell, the system
> reboots normally. If I boot the installed kernel (bsd.mp) and run
> reboot from the shell, the system powers down briefly and then comes
> back up and reboots. OpenBSD does not behave this way on the two
> Thinkpads on which I have it installed. Nor have I seen this behavior
> with Linux or FreeBSD that I had run previously on the workstation. I
> did get into the bios setup at one point, to see if there was some
> sort of option/setting that might relate to this, found nothing,
> escaped back to the top-level and exited without saving. To my
> surprise, the machine did the same thing -- powered down briefly and
> then came back up. While this is not a huge problem, the extra power
> cycling probably does the machine no good (though in the steady-state,
> once I've got OpenBSD completely sorted out, I won't be doing nearly
> as much rebooting as I've been doing while getting things together;
> the machine is normally powered off, I boot it every few days to do
> some work for a few hours, and then shut it down). While the behavior
> I saw when exiting  the bios setup prompts me to ask Lenovo about
> this. But since this behavior began with the installation of OpenBSD,
> it also seems appropriate to query this list.
>
> Any good ideas about either of these will be appreciated.

I am not the one able to help with this, but the dmesg output 
(/var/run/dmesg.boot) is almost always needed. Look at the section 
'Reporting Bugs' in the FAQ first. Also, check with Lenovo if there are 
any bios updates available.

Btw, do you experience the uhci troubles under OpenBSD/i386 (you forgot to 
mention here that you are running amd64)? Booting i386 bsd.rd should be 
enough to test. Maybe this comparison could be helpful.

Regards,
David