DragonFlyBSD

On a Pentium 4 PC, Asus P4B266 motherboard, and on a Lenovo Ideapad Intel Atom N270, both pure i386 and with 1GB of RAM, copying a kernel from /boot such as
cp -R kernel kernel.good
does not result in a bootable kernel. Booting fails at the loader prompt with:

can't load 'kernel'
boot: no bootable kernel

cd-ing into /boot/kernel.old boots properly.

The same cp-ing procedure results in bootable kernels even running i386 on 64-bit machines or even i386 in Vmware Fusion on a 64-bit Macbook.

Booting is done from Ubuntu LTS 12.04 grub2. The original installations date back to early 2010.

Examination using

ls -loa

shows no unusual flags or permissions in /boot. But an obvious question is should the schg flag be temporarily removed from /boot/kernel/kernel when copying?

Also, should there be a symbolic link of kernel.BOOTP -> kernel in directory /boot/kernel?