RE: FreeBSD boot menu is missing

So what you do, instead, is make sure there is a little space left over
at the end of the slice that you create in the first step. Then, once
gmirror is available, you gmirror label the slice, then gmirror insert
the corresponding slice on the other disk(s), and gmirror rebuild. No
copying involved; gmirror takes care of it all.

The key here is that 'gmirror label' is non-destructive as long as the
last sector on the provider is unused.

The problem is I was unable to get multiple slices defined in a sysinstall config script. I tried many variations of parameters to pump into diskPartitionEditor and diskLabelEditor so that we could create three slices during the install but I couldn't find anything that worked. So I ended up having to create a single full disk slice to install the OS onto, and then in a post commit step slice the disks up as we want them and copy the OS over. I couldn't find a single example how to create multiple slices in a sysinstall config file. If you know how to do this, I'd love to see it.

It does, AFAIK, even on SATA, provided the controller supports it and is
configured correctly.

With the proper controller and drive, yes, FreeBSD does support hot swap, to a point. Let's say for example that you have a file system mounted on a drive and that drive dies. You can pull it and put in a new one, but FreeBSD will not let you unmount the file system on the original drive. Even umount -f fails. We have to reboot to get the old mount point released, and we haven't found any way around this.

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