hangup on boot

[Doug White]

On Sun, 11 Jan 2004 mcabanatuan at wi.rr.com wrote:

> At any rate, I've tried using my 4.3-RELEASE, 5.1-RELEASE cd's but those
> fail to even load due to a fault in the loader.

I've had this problem on systems with Adaptec controllers and bad
partition tables.  This might be related.

> Ok so now the problem, pardon the winded explanation. I successfully
> created paritions and mount points and installed a system to them.
> Finished install, removed the CD, rebooted, and that ended that pretty
> much. After it get's past loading up the BIOS and initializing the
> system, the loader comes up for me to push 'F1' to load FreeBSD. I do
> that and all I get is a system beep. Nothing loads, nothing happens, and
> I am able to keep pushing F1 with more beeps. No errors, no loading of
> anything, no nothin.

See the FAQ on this one -- the geometry in your partition table doesn't
match the BIOS's expectation, so boot0 can't find the partition to boot.
Best thing to do here is to zero out the front end of the disk, boot a
win98 boot floppy, and use dos fdisk to create a small primary dos
partition. boot the install cd, remove the partition, and install as
normal.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org