Boot hangs at "/bin/sh?", can't see USB keyboard

Bill Moran wmoran at collaborativefusion.com
Wed Jul 12 17:40:03 UTC 2006


In response to Chris Shenton <chris at shenton.org>:

> I have a borked entry in my /etc/fstab: the box can't find /dev/da4s1
> or something at boot.  So it hangs at boot asking me if I want to use
> /bin/sh in single user mode.  But when I bang on the USB keyboard,
> FreeBSD doesn't hear the keys.
> 
> I recall that previous boot menus offered a "boot with USB keyboard"
> option, but this is no longer on my FreeBSD-6.1 version built from
> cvsup a couple months back. 
> 
> Any suggestions how to get it to see the USB keyboard in the boot?
> This Dell box doesn't have a non-USB keyboard input. 

We have a number of Dell servers here.  The availability of the USB
keyboard is heavily dependent on a number of things: BIOS settings and
the exact hardware model are two of them.

On some Dells, there is a BIOS option to boot with "USB legacy support"
(or some similar wording) or without USB support at all.  Having the
correct setting is pivotal to getting the USB keyboard to work.  The
correct setting varies from model to model.  What fun.

Additionally, sometimes escaping the boot loader and setting
hint.atkbd.0.flags="0x1" is still required on some hardware (even with
6.1).

The exact combination is achieved by trial and error.  I suggest making
a little matrix and trying all possible combinations until you find the
one that works.

> If not, any suggestions on how to get it to boot to a point where I
> could fix the /etc/fstab?  Only thing I can think of is burn a
> bootable FreeBSD disk, boot from it, then mount the hard drive and fix
> fstab from that.  

That might be faster ... get a FreeSBIE disk.

-- 
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list