5.2.1 boot fails; "Could not find Primary Volume Descriptor"

[Jon Noack]

On 3/24/2004 4:37 PM, Nicolai E M Plum wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am having problems booting FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE on a system I
> have. Booting from CD gives me:
> 
> ----
> [other messages from the BIOS]
> CD Loader 1.01
> 
> Building the boot loader arguments
> Read Error: 0x01
> Could not find Primary Volume Descriptor
> ----
> 
> Booting from floppies works OK.
> 
> The same happens when trying to boot a CD of 5.1-RC1 that I happen to
> still have around. 4.9-RELEASE boots fine from CD.
> 
> Hardware is an older Dell Pentium Pro system, with a Samsung SM-532
> DVD-ROM CD-RW drive.
> 
> Any ideas why this happens? I've worked around it, but it's a bit
> awkward. I can't find any details of why it happens in searching mailing
> lists.

The 5.x bootable install CDs no longer use floppy-emulation mode.  The 
change was made because some newer machines do not support this 
emulation mode.  However, older machines may not be able to boot CDs in 
"native" (non-emulation) mode.  We can't support everybody, so we 
support the new machines.

In many cases a BIOS update will fix this, so you might check for that.

Jon