Problems booting operating system and with root password

[Bill Moran]

"Sam Speranini" <samsperanini at bellnet.ca> wrote:

> Thank you for the quick response and I will try booting up in single mode
> for the root password issue.
> One of our main boxes at boot up comes up with the error message below and
> goes no further. It seems like the kernel is missing or got corrupted. The
> box ran fine till yesterday morning when we noticed it was at this stage. Is
> there anything that can be done to recover.

If this machine worked before, then _something_ has occurred to corrupt
data on disk.  Some possible reasons are breakin, operator error, or
hardware failure.

If you're not _sure_ this was caused by operator error, then you should
be afraid: either your box was compromised or your hard drives are
failing.

In either of those scenerios, you need to rebuild the box, possibly after
replacing hardware.  Hopefully you have backups, if not, you may be
forking out good money for a data recovery company to extract your
data off a damaged hard drive.  If it's a breakin, you might be able
to boot the system off a live CD (such as FreeSBIE) and get your data
off the drive before rebuilding.  If it's a hardware failure, you can
try the liveCD thing, but it's less likely to work.

Good luck.

> Press <Ctrl-E> for BMC Setup within 5 sec.....
> No /boot/loader
> 
> FreeBSD /i386 boot
> Default: 0:da(0,a)/kernel
> boot:
> No /Kernel
> 
> FreeBSD /i386 boot
> Default: 0:da(0,a)/kernel
> boot:



-- 
Bill Moran

Two by two, hands of blue.