Hi, guys. I am writing this for those of us who
experienced(experiencing) dreaded "BTX halted" error. Tonight, I decided
to upgrade my aging 4.3 stable system to shiny new 4.7 system. I been
doing cvsup but neglected to do major upgrade and I found out I couldn't
do 4.7 upgrade from 4.3. Since I did not have another box with 4.7 on it
to build kernel and move it over to questioned system, I blissfully
downloaded and burned 4.7 stable iso. Pop that baby into it and proceed
to upgrade. Everything went to normal (I read INSTALL.TXT three times
before upgrade, especially upgrade section). Sysinstall told me to get
the cd out and reboot. I did. Up comes 4.7? NOT!
int=00000000 err=00000000 efl=00030046 eip=000009c4
eax=0000f000 ebx=00000102 ecx=0000ffff edx=00000580
esi=00007d91 edi=00000005 ebp=000003f6 esp=0000095f
cs=f000 ds=f000 es=1400 fs=0000 gs=0000 ss=f000
cs:eip=2e 0f 01 16 08 0a 0f 20-c0 83 c8 01 0f 22 c0 ea
ss:esp=61 09 bc 67 09 09 bc 00-69 09 bc 6f 09 09 31 00
BTX halted
It stared at me like demon from hell. Maybe some of you gurus could
chuckle and solve this in a heartbeat, but I am fairly newbie and I was
horrified. Fortunately, I keep my e-mail on another box with W2K which
keeps my freebsd-questions mailing lists. I did quick search and found
the mail written by Matthew Seaman at Sep 30th, 2002 ( Subject: Re: BTX
halted ). In it, he said to load installation CD and boot the machine,
interrupt the boot sequence at "Press space to interrupt ... " sign and
issue these commands at "ok" prompt
unload
lsdev
set currdev=[your hard drive name from lsdev]
load kernel
boot
( *Be sure to select correct disk for it. You should have your "mount"
command output written or printed on your desk before doing any upgrade.
In my case, I knew that first slice of disk is root partition mounted
as "/". So I choose very first disk1 subentry from lsdev. Yours may vary
so take note. )
Well, that booted the system and all my entries on /etc has been
preserved which was nice, but I had this nagging feeling that problem
has not been solved, so I booted again with CD out. Same s**t again! I
then proceed to do "boot -s". I performed fsck -f, then reboot. Another
s**t again!
I booted into the system and reestablished Internet connection. I
checked the handbook from www.freebsd.org and found this:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/boot-blocks.html
In it, I have found this entry to restore your MBR using this method:
fdisk -B -b /boot/boot0 ad0
Mine is IDE, hence ad0, if yours are SCSI, use appropriate device name.
Voila! System boots! ( without CD )
This has been fun(?) experience. Hopefully, my pointless rant could help
someone else out there with this same problem. Again, many thanks to
Matthew Seaman for being a such a helping hand to this newbie.
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message