9.0-RELEASE amd64 Bricked My Hard Drive

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 5 Jan 2012, Bill Tillman wrote:

> Well the install finished and
> then I attempted to reboot the system but nothing happened. And by that I
> mean the computer's flash screen would come up and give me the choice
> to enter the Bios Setup or Boot Menu and that's all.

The BIOS on some systems expects a particular partition layout.  In the 
old days, Compaq had a BIOS partition on the disk.  Today, there are 
there are still weird things that can be vendor-specific.  Or new 
standards like UEFI.

So the problem could be specific to that particular computer model or 
brand.  Attaching the drive to a USB to IDE adapter might avoid the 
problem, allowing a boot from another drive.  Before rewriting the 
do-nothing drive, use 'gpart show' or fdisk to see the partition layout 
that is the problem.