From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Nov 21 11:27:35 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0DD3937B401 for ; Thu, 21 Nov 2002 11:27:34 -0800 (PST) Received: from testmail.wolves.k12.mo.us (testmail.wolves.k12.mo.us [207.160.214.10]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 76BC543E4A for ; Thu, 21 Nov 2002 11:27:33 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us) Received: by testmail.wolves.k12.mo.us (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 333F81A951; Thu, 21 Nov 2002 13:27:27 -0600 (CST) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by testmail.wolves.k12.mo.us (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2E6791A947; Thu, 21 Nov 2002 13:27:27 -0600 (CST) Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 13:27:27 -0600 (CST) From: Chris Dillon To: Andrew Y Ng Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Boot stuck at F1 after swapping drives In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20021121130217.I23955-100000@duey.wolves.k12.mo.us> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Andrew Y Ng wrote: > Hi all, I shutdown FreeBSD and changed my harddrive and booted up > Win2K this morning (needed Windoze for something real quick). I put > the FreeBSD harddrive back and it wouldn't boot, it got stuck at the > F1 boot0 prompt. Like it couldn't find the MBR or something. How do > I get it to boot again? > > This is weird. Maybe I didn't shut it down correctly this morning. I encountered the same kind of weirdness when I was trying to build a FreeBSD-based firewall for somebody and un-plugged my normal drive(s) which have Windows XP and FreeBSD installed on them and then proceeded to do a fresh FreeBSD 4.7 installation on a new lone disk. Once finished, it wouldn't boot. I would get "Operating system missing" with the standard boot sector installed, and with the boot manager installed, it would hang after F1. Using the install CD boot-loader, I could unload the CD kernel and load /kernel off of the newly installed drive and start to boot it, but it would hang immediately after issuing 'boot'. So, I try a completely different hard drive (a little bigger and newer, but only a 10GB drive), do a 4.7 installation on it, and it worked. Then I re-installed on the same drive, and it DIDN'T work. Nothing changed in the BIOS or hardware, just a re-install. I tried re-installing over and over again with different boot options and different ways of partitioning it. I tried with both 4.6 and 4.7 releases, thinking maybe there was some kind of bootloader breakage in 4.7. No go. What type of IDE controller are you using? I was using a Promise 133 TX2 add-on card. I tried the on-board ATA33 (PIIX4) controller on my system, and encountered the same problem, though I never actually completely removed the add-on card. It is possible the Promise BIOS was causing problems even though it claimed it didn't load since I didn't have any devices attached to the card. I racked my brain with that problem for hours and finally gave up. Luckily when I plugged my regular drives back in XP and FreeBSD booted up just fine on those. One thing I probably should have tried was to dd a bunch of zeroes over the first few MB of the drive so that I'd be starting with a "fresh" drive before installation. -- Chris Dillon - cdillon(at)wolves.k12.mo.us FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet - Available for IA32 (Intel x86) and Alpha architectures - IA64, PowerPC, UltraSPARC, ARM, and S/390 under development - http://www.freebsd.org No trees were harmed in the composition of this message, although some electrons were mildly inconvenienced. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message