Machine doesn't boot after switching from Linux to FreeBSD (solved)

[Chris Zumbrunn]

On Dec 5, 2004, at 12:24 PM, Chris Zumbrunn wrote:

> After fdisk, disklabel, and newfs for the disks and the rsync for the 
> data I am left with a system that won't boot. When attempting to boot 
> from the local disks I can't ping the system anymore, when net-booting 
> back into rescue mode I see that nothing was written to 
> /var/messages/log. So, I guess this looks like a bootstrapping 
> problem. The FreeBSD config that I'm rsynching to the new box is 
> FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE. Both the existing machine and the new machine 
> have the same kind of disks in them:
>
> ar0: 117246MB <ATA RAID1 array> [14946/255/63] status: READY subdisks:
>  0 READY ad0: 117246MB <Maxtor 6Y120L0> [238216/16/63] at ata0-master 
> PIO4
>           1 READY ad2: 117246MB <Maxtor 6Y120L0> [238216/16/63] at 
> ata1-master
>

Finally found time again to attempt to resolve this and was able to get 
the system to boot after re-editing the slice table, partition table 
and again installing the bootstrapping code.

# fdisk -i ar0
# disklabel -e ar0s1
# fdisk -B ar0
# disklabel -B ar0s1

Not sure what the problem really was, but I noticed that for some 
reason I had ended up with slices 1, 2 and 3 unused and slice 4 for 
FreeBSD. I changed that to slice 1 - maybe that somehow made a 
difference.

Chris