Well THAT'S weird...
I wondered if there might be some strange data left on the drive (I had a
4.7-RELEASE install on it prior to this), so I stopped the system in POST
and entered the Adaptec system utilities. I then did a low-level format of
the drive. Reinstalled and Hey Presto - booted up fine! I wonder if the
/boot/loader program found some bad data left over from a prior install that
it didn't validate and that corrupted the boot process?
Dunno, but it's up now. THANKS!!
Mike
-Original Message-
From: Tony Frank [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2004 10:08 PM
To: Mike Newell
Cc: Tony Frank; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Boot loop in FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE after install
Hi,
On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 09:48:04PM -0500, Mike Newell wrote:
On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, Tony Frank wrote:
tfrank While I cannot perhaps comment on your problem, you can
try either pressing
tfrank 'pause' key or 'scrolllock' which might help depending
on where the problems
tfrank are occuring.
They don't work. Fortunately I was able to:
1. Hook a null modem to the serial port and my laptop.
2. Run hyperterm on my laptop to view serial port data.
3. During the initial boot load hit ESC to get the Boot: promt,
then do -h to switch to serial console.
4. Capture the stuff on the serial console.
What it does is repeatedly go through the BTX boot loader, saying
something like (this is from memory):
BTX loader...
BIOS Drive A is disk 0
BIOS Drive C is disk 1
BIOS Drive D is disk 2
BTX loader...
BIOS Drive A is disk 3
BIOS Drive C is disk 4
BIOS Drive D is disk 5
BTX loader...
and so on. Eventually it runs out of drive numbers and starts saying
Can't figure out our boot device a few times, then crashes with an
assert error. Looks like the loader is just looping until it
runs out of
heap.
That suggests that it may be confused somehow.
I saw the crash/assert type scenario if the boot blocks are not installed
properly.
Ie the MBR is updated with the bootmgr (F1 .. bit) but the 2nd/3rd stages
were corrupted somehow.
(In my case I accidentally overwrote the blocks with some
experiementation)
You can reinstall boot blocks using bsdlabel (or disklabel on 4.9)
If you can boot from floppy/CD, get into fixit mode.
Then run:
bsdlabel -B da0s1 (assuming da0 is the disk you are trying to boot from)
If I try to boot directly into the kernel the cursor changes from a
blinking underscore to a solid block and the system just locks up.
In no case is there an error message or any other indication that
something is weird.
Have you tried 4.9-RELEASE on this system?
I understand that 5.2.1-RC2 ISO is also available which might be
another option.
Regards,
Tony
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