cannot boot, at mountroot> prompt

[Lowell Gilbert]

Bob Collins <freebsd at anything-inc.com> writes:

> I have a system running 5.0-RELEASE on an AMD 667Mhz processor with
> 256MB ram, Soyo mobo. Install was no trouble, and setup of X, KDE,
> MySQL, Apache went fine. I ran a setup of both xmms and mplayer as
> well. Then I went for an install of Webmin.
> 
> Once webmin was complete, I was running in KDE, I closed the term
> window and the machine rebooted immediately, no shutdown, nothing.
> 
> Question, does this sound like a bad drive, RAM, or perhaps my bad luck.
> Second question, how can I address the mountroot> prompt?
> 
> Per the instructions at the prompt, I put in ufs:/dev/ad0s1a and hit
> the return key. The system then reboots.

To start with, you should definitely update your system to something
more recent.  5.0 was, after all, a very early "technology preview"
release from a branch that, after nearly a year, still isn't ready to
produce a production release.  Unless you have some (at least minimal)
skills at tracking down these kinds of problems, you should probably
move to the latest release, 4.9.

That said, there will probably be some hints in a kernel dump.