Hallo,

Thanks, managed to solve the problem.

The OS was booting using a logical order of the virtual drives created in BIOS.

Unfortunately this cannot be seen/changed from the normal BIOS; took me a while to figure how to use the WebBIOS and reconfigure/add the new logical drive.

Rebooted; re-installed OS - but it brought an error "cannot find active partition"

Rebooted; re-installed OS - this made made sure c0t0d0s0 has the / slice - but it brought a different error "Bad PBR Sig"

Took more hours to find the solution - incidentally, the first virtual drive number fell on the 2nd hard-drive.

Deleted the virtual drive on the 2nd hard-drive, finished installation to end; Got an error in the OS related to missing partitions on the 2nd hard-drive.

Rebooted to WebBIOS and re-configured the virtual drive in 2nd hardisk - and prayed for the best.

And incidentally that fixed the issue.