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

Chris Shenton chris at shenton.org
Fri Jan 28 18:52:39 PST 2005


I rebuilt my kernel in 5.3-STABLE from CVS, installed as normal. When I
rebooted, the BIOS said "No system disk, insert and reboot" or
something. Ug, hosed.

Then I recalled I was trying to figure out how to write to a new ATAPI
CD burner, but used one of the SCSI burner utils; it failed but I
suspect I had specified and hosed something in my SCSI disk which is
the only disk I have, where the OS lives. I suspected I had trashed
the Master Boot Record.

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.

Since my system was running fine until the reboot, and because I
installed a newly built kernel, I suspect what's on the disk is mostly
good but I've trashed the low level boot stuff. That arcana is beyond
my understanding. :-(

I'd like to be able to recover, get it to boot, without having to
reinstall from CD ISO -- without overwriting all my hairy configs (the
box was a print server for the house for FreeBSD and Mac, amongst other
things, and got a lot of it's /usr/local type of stuff from my main
machine over NFS -- painful to re-create properly).

What is it not finding when it waits at the "Default: F1" prompt?  Any
guru suggestions for how to recover gracefully?

Thanks a bunch.



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