Booting Issues - ACPI and HD

[Ryan Winograd]

Hey all,

Before I get into my FreeBSD issue, I would like to apologize for not 
being able to provide abundant details in this first submission. The 
server I am having trouble with is located at school (it's the tech club 
server) and so I don't have a lot of access to it when it is convenient.

Here it is:

The server was shutdown somehow. I'm not yet sure how, but I don't think 
anyone ran a shutdown command. But it was shutdown, and when it tried to 
boot back up, it freaked out. More specifically, it had issues with ACPI 
and mounting the root partition. When booting with ACPI, it would spit 
out some error about ACPI checksum failing. Then it would get to the 
point where it was trying to mount the hd. It can't, and gives a prompt 
asking me to manually provide the location of the root partition. I do 
that - ufs:/dev/ad0s1a (or something like that) - and it fails. When 
booting with ACPI disabled, it skips the ACPI errors (obviously) but 
still can't mount the drive.

Now, I have been successful booting Knoppix-STD (linux liveCD), but did 
not have time (unfortunately) to try mounting the drive. I'll try that 
when I get a chance. I say this because I'm not sure if the drive is 
broken or the data is corrupted. Or there may be some other cause.

I have been running BSD on several servers for a few years now, and have 
never had a problem like this. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Again, 
sorry for lack of details, I'll get more when I can.

Thanks,
Ryan

P.S. My current plan is to install FreeBSD onto another drive, then copy 
over bins, confs, and data. I can't do this for a couple days, so I am 
hoping to come across a solution that would allow me to repair the 
current installation.