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Date:      Fri, 18 Aug 2000 11:44:23 -0700 (PDT)
From:      John Baldwin <jhb@pike.osd.bsdi.com>
To:        John Johnson <ioann_j@yahoo.com>
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD Won't Boot - Laptop
Message-ID:  <200008181844.LAA14687@pike.osd.bsdi.com>
In-Reply-To: <20000818152027.29186.qmail@web4102.mail.yahoo.com> from John Johnson at "Aug 18, 2000 08:20:27 am"

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John Johnson wrote:
> I've installed FreeBSD 4.1 on my Dell Inspiron 3200,
> and the installation appears to have gone fine. On
> restarting the system, though, FreeBSD won't boot.
> I've gone through the install several times now, with
> the same result. I am using the entire hard disk (3.9
> GB), and I've set the slice as bootable. My partitions
> are as follows:
> 
> /        100M
> swap     228M     (I've 128M RAM)
> /var      81M
> /usr    3500M
> 
> After the install is complete, the system reboots and
> sits at a blinking underline cursor.
> 
> Is this a problem with the MBR? The stange thing is,
> if I insert my Windows 2000 install CD and don't
> select to run from CD, FreeBSD will boot, so I'm
> assuming the problem is with the boot sector on my
> hard drive.

Yes, there was a bug in the boot0 binary shipped with 4.1
RELEASE. :(  I've just added an errata entry for this to
the website, although it won't show up until tomorrow.  Here
is the text though:

The FreeBSD Boot Manager (boot0) has a bug that causes it to hang the machine
during boot with no screen output.

Fix: Boot your machine into FreeBSD either via a boot floppy or a CD-ROM, then
download a new boot0 binary from the following location:

        http://people.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/4.1R/i386/boot0

Once you have downloaded the new binary, install it with the boot0cfg command
onto your hard disk.  For example, if you have boot0 on disk ad0, you would
run the following command:

        /usr/sbin/boot0cfg -B -b /path/to/downloaded/boot0 ad0

You may also use cvsup to update your source tree and build the new boot0
binary from source.  You will need version 1.14.2.3 of
src/sys/boot/i386/boot0/boot0.s or newer.

The MD5 checksum of this file is:

        MD5 (boot0) = 8770a386dba44f0aa06b15db72c1f624

To verify the checksum of your downloaded copy, perform the following
command:

        /sbin/md5 /path/to/downloaded/boot0

and compare with the above.

> Any thoughts?
> 
> Thanks,
> John Johnson

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb@bsdi.com> -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
PGP Key: http://www.cslab.vt.edu/~jobaldwi/pgpkey.asc
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/


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