[nycbug-talk] boot problem solved

[Brian A. Seklecki]

Ahh, the bootloader / MBR must have accidentally been written to your 
data-drives causing the confusion.  A common problem for sysinstall 
newcomers.  Wont cause you any problems other than confusion.

Normally you'd get "unable to find bootable drive", and, depending on the 
BIOS (award/phoenix/AMI), it would try the bootable media it comprehends 
in some arbitrary order based on the alignment of the starts and the menu 
at the local Thai restaurant.

God I pine for OpenFirmware.

~BAS

On Sun, 2 Sep 2007, jekillen wrote:

> Yup, I did it again;
>
> regarding this exchange:
>
> Gotta love how this stuff still happens in 2007, huh>
>
> What we need to do is validate that the BIOS of your motherboard is
> mapping device at 0x80 to what FreeBSD later interprets to be "ad4".
>
> The 1st and 2nd stage boot loader isn't going to know anything about
> kernel device names.
>
> We know because the 1st stage loader is starting that the BIOS is
> picking the correct physical drive to read the MBR from.
>
> Break out of the boot loader and send us the output of:
>
> 	lsdev -v
> 	boot-conf
> 	show
>
> Also, we can find out what changed in loader(8) on AMD64 pretty easily
> between 6.0 and 6.2 using CVS.
>
> And following the instructions regarding watching for the spinner and
> hitting any key at the prompt, I
> was not getting the spinner at all.
>
> But, I went back to look at my bios settings and did not have the
> bootable drive set to be the first
> drive after the cdrom to try to boot from.
>
> So, I corrected that and I am up an running.
> In the future all your info and instructions will be very useful.
> Thanks again, I was contemplating swapping out the drive with the root
> partition with an IDE drive
> and reinstalling, that would been the long way around and a waste of
> time.
> Jeff K
>
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l8*
 	-lava (Brian A. Seklecki - Pittsburgh, PA, USA)
 	       http://www.spiritual-machines.org/

     "Guilty? Yeah. But he knows it. I mean, you're guilty.
     You just don't know it. So who's really in jail?"
     ~Maynard James Keenan