Re: Boot stuck at F1 after swapping drives

On Wed, 2002-11-20 at 23:13, Andy Sparrow wrote:
> > yeah, i have BIOS in AUTO, I was able to boot to the harddrive with a
> > cdrom by using 0:da(0,a)/kernel, but the harddrive's boot0 booter
> > couldn't boot it on its own.
> > 
> > Since I can boot to it, the BIOS should have correct setting for the
> > drive right?
> 
> IME, it's entirely possible for FreeBSD to have a bogus idea of the 
> geometry which prevents booting from the drive (the last 5-6 large 
> drives I've set up on machines with old BIOS'es have done this if I 
> don't create an M$DOS partition from M$ FDISK first - you can even 
> delete it in 'sysinstall', it just forces the correct geometry when the 
> disk is read in 'sysinstall', IIUC), but you can load the boot stuff 
> just fine from (e.g.) CD-ROM and then boot the kernel off the drive...
> 
> I presume that this is because the BIOS can boot the CD, and the 
> CD-loaded boot stuff has the same bogus idea of the geometry, and can 
> then load the kernel

That makes sense.

> 
> However, if you have /ever/ booted FreeBSD directly from this HDD, then 
> this probably isn't what happened (the geometry shouldn't change, and it 
> was valid once).

and Yes, before I swapped drives, I was able to boot FreeBSD without any
problems.

> For some reason, some part of the boot stuff got lunched, and you 
> probably just need to re-write it. My firewall box did this once after a 
> power-cycle, I have no idea why.

Right, I think the power management stuff might've screwed up the MBR. I
tried rewriting it with boot0cfg per suggestions by Giorgos Keramidas,
but no luck.

> I don't recall what I did to get around this now, it was either
>  
> 	disklabel -B da0s1 auto
> 
> or
> 	boot0cfg -d 0x80
> 
> or something like that... 'man boot' would be a good place to start. :-)
> 
> Disclaimer: it's your disk, not mine. Take appropriate precautions, 
> including treating the above advice with some caution (I think I was on 
> 4.4-STABLE when I did the above, but it *was* some time ago)...
> 
> In particular, if I were in your position, I think I'd be inclined to 
> wait and see if someone chimes in with a response of 
> "NNNNNNOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!" to the above advice :->

Yeah, I booted it off with a CDROM, and I dont reboot my laptop very
often, so it's not that bad (not like it's a server or anything). I
hoping one of you guys would know what to do.

I'm wondering if I can just get rid of the booter, I only have one OS on
my FreeBSD drive, so it doesn't really make sense to have a booter with
only one option, I don't know, but when I had NetBSD I didn't even have
a booter. How do I get right of boot0?

-- 
andrew y ng  <[email protected]>  http://andrewng.com

fingerprint :
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