BTX halted on boot

[Matthew Seaman]

Dominik Meister wrote:
> Hi
> 
> We are experiencing a problem with one of our FreBSD 6.2 machines. The
> machine has been running fine for months until we had to reboot it. Now
> it doesn't boot anymore. After the boot loader we get what looks like a
> register dump:
> 
> FreeBSD/i386 boot
> Default: 0:ad(0,a)heap
> boot: /boot/kernel/kernel\
> int=0000000e  err=00000002  efl=00010086  eip=c042426a
> eax=c06da7a8  ebx=c06da7a0  ecx=00000000  edx=f000ff53
> esi=00000000  edi=c06da57f  ebp=c08f6d4c  esp=c08f6d40
> cs=0008  ds=0010  es=0010    fs=0010  gs=0010  ss=0010
> cs:eip=89 42 0c eb 07 90 8d 43-08 89 46 14 89 5e 10 8d
>        46 10 89 43 0c 8b 47 0c-89 43 10 85 c0 74 0b 8b
> ss:esp=7f a5 6d c0 00 00 8f 00-00 e0 8f 00 64 6d 8f c0
>        75 3b 42 c0 a0 a7 6d c0-7f a5 6d c0 20 a5 6d c0
> BTX halted
> 
> and the machine reboots.
> 
> Any suggestions what might be the problem? All I can find about "BTX
> halted" references to problems when installing a fresh system and not
> out of a sudden on machine which has been running fine before.
> 
> Any hints are highly appreciated.

This is telling you that the boot loader has become corrupted, and
is crashing.  A leading cause for this would be hardware failure --
something gone wonky with your hard drive.

Try booting the 'fixit' system from the installation media and see
if you can fsck and access the filesystems on the disk -- it may be
a localised problem that's killed the ability to boot from the drive leaving the rest unaffected.   Or the entire drive may be toast, and
you've got no option other than to get yourself a new drive and restore
from backup. Actually, given the fairly cheap price of disks nowadays,
I wouldn't try too hard to fix up the original disk: if you're going to 
have to spend some hours working on it, it's more economic to ditch
the old one and start afresh.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
                                                  Flat 3
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey     Ramsgate
                                                  Kent, CT11 9PW

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