Boot fails: Default F1? hangs. Trashed MBR? replaced FBSD mbr.

[Andriy Tkachuk]

maybe the reason you didn't receive any answer about your
problem till now is that you choose the wrong list for your problem

the right one is probably -questions

anyway: you probably lost the partiotion table as well as mbr.
if your filesystems didn't reformatted or erased - all is fine,
you don't have to panic since all your information don't lost.

if you lost your partition table, you can recover.
for this you must find the first sectors of you partitions.
all this recovery staff you should do on some another machine
or booting from fixit cd, but the first is the best.

the first sector of your first slice (let's call it right)
starts probably on 63 sector. create it (fdisk) with some
reasonable size, say 500Mb. after this try disklabel (if it
has several partitions) or fsck to see it's real size.
probably you can use some another util for this - no matter.
the main idia is that you recover you partition table
by content of your partiotions. you may find useful for
this dd(1) and file(1) utils.

sorry i have no time now for bigger explanations,
also i did such staff several years ago (there was even worse
case - i erase the disklabels on fbsd slice) and i don't
remember some exact things, but i think you will overcome this.

regards

On Saturday 29 January 2005 05:01, you wrote:
> Chris Shenton <chris at shenton.org> writes:
> > So I booted from floppies, went to Wizard mode, did the Install
> > FreeBSD Bootmanager. Rebooted. Now it halts at the prompt "Default:
> > F1" and beeps when I hit any key, like RETURN, F1, etc.
>
> Forgot to mention...
>
> When I was installing the FreeBSD MBR from floppy, I don't recall the
> sysinstall program showing me any partitions, at all.  Perhaps I've
> wiped out the info on disk that says where they are and what size.
> Again, I'm getting way outside my understanding of FreeBSD's boot
> process, but figured this might be rather significant. I'm getting a
> bad feeling about this.
>
> Thanks again.
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