Stuck in bootstrapping hell - how do I troubleshoot?

[Chris Zumbrunn]

On Apr 22, 2005, at 6:16 PM, Alex Zbyslaw wrote:

> Chris Zumbrunn wrote:
>
>>
>> On Apr 22, 2005, at 2:01 PM, Alex Zbyslaw wrote:
>>
>>> I.e. you can boot some OS which is not the one of the local disk?  
>>> If so, then boot the network FreeBSD, mount your local disks and 
>>> look at /var/log/messages.  If the machine was at least booting 
>>> FreeBSD when it died then you should see something.
>>
>>
>> I did check that. Nothing is written to /var/log/messages during a 
>> local boot attempt. So, the boot fails before that.
>
> Could it be that the boot manager is fine but that the partition it 
> tries to boot from by default does not exist, or has windows or 
> something?  E.g. you have three partitions, FreeBSD is on the second 
> but it is trying to boot from the first?  So if you were sat in front 
> of it you could press e.g. F2, but since you're not, you can't!  (I.e. 
> partitions in the "windows" sense).
>
> If that's plausible then I believe there is a way to change the boot 
> manager's idea of which partition to boot from, but I don't know it 
> offhand -- check the handbook.

The FreeBSD partition is the first partition and it is active, which is 
what I believe determines where the BIOS will look for a MBR. The other 
three partitions are unused.

The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 165,(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
     start 63, size 240107427 (117239 Meg), flag 80 (active)
         beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
         end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
<UNUSED>

> Clutching at straws for you here.  Just how hard is it to get someone 
> to sit in front of the console?  (I mean that as a genuine question; 
> not being sarcastic).  It seems like you could have your answer in 
> five minutes if only someone was watching...

Yes, I'm just waiting until someone has to go by there anyway in the 
next days. No big deal, but it's not urgent enough to justify the trip 
just for that. In the meantime, it is annoying to know that ultimately 
I just have this problem because I'm doing something wrong!  ...where 
am I screwing up the setup?  :-)

Chris