Boot loader doesn't see ATA disk after successful install

Brian O'Shea b_oshea at yahoo.com
Tue May 10 13:31:11 PDT 2005


Hello all,

I recently installed FreeBSD 5.4-RC4 on an i386 (I know, just before
5.4-RELEASE was posted...I should have waited!).  The install was
successful, however after it completed and the system rebooted, the
boot loader could not find the root filesystem.  This system also has
a SCSI disk (disk2) which has an older release of FreeBSD installed.
That is the FFS and swap partitions that you see in the lsdev output
below.  The IDE disk onto which I installed 5.4-RC4 is disk1 (as can
be seen by the currdev setting; see below).  Note that it sees the
disk, but not the partitions that I created on it.

OK lsdev
cd devices:
disk devices:
    disk0:   BIOS drive A:
    disk1:   BIOS drive C:
    disk2:   BIOS drive D:
        disk2s1a: FFS
        disk2s1b: swap
        disk2s1d: FFS
        disk2s1e: FFS
        disk2s1f: FFS
        disk2s1g: FFS
pxe devices:
OK show currdev
disk1s1a:
OK ls
open '/' failed: no such file dor directory
OK

Not OK!  :-/
Any idea what I could have done wrong?  When I created the slice on
disk1, sysinstall warned me that the geometry was incorrect.  Instead
it used some other values that it considered to be more sane.  I have
gone through the install twice, both with the same results.  The
second time I looked up what the BIOS thought the geometry was, and
specified that to sysinstall.  In both cases I created one slice on
the disk containing all available space, and created partitions for
the filesystems and swap device.  I also installed the boot loader in
the MBR.

Any advice kindly appreciated.  Please let me know if there is any
more information that you need about my system and I will do my best
to provide it.

Regards,
-brian


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