Why won't FreeBSD boot from hard drive??

Aaron VanAlstine aaronvan at comcast.net
Mon May 29 09:38:13 PDT 2006


The SATA controller chip is the Intel ICH7R Southbridge RAID Controller. The
hard is selected as the boot device; however, it seems to default back to
the DVD/CD upon reboot. Even when I disconnect the DVD/CD it doesn't look to
the hard drives.

I wonder if there is a problem booting the OS from the RAID array? The
motherboard manual states "If you want to boot the system from a HD included
in a created RAID array, copy first the RAID driver from the support CD to a
floppy disk before you install an OS to the selected HD." However, I don't
have a floppy drive and I suspect they assume I'm loading Windows.

Do you think it makes a difference if I install FreeBSD and then configure
the RAID array, or visa-versa?

-- Aaron


On 5/28/06 12:57, "Kevin Kinsey" <kdk at daleco.biz> wrote:

> Aaron VanAlstine wrote:
>> I successfully loaded FreeBSD 6.0 from CD all the way until the system
>> reboots; however, the computer seems regard the DVD/CD as the boot hard
>> drive and is trying to boot from that. During boot-up it auto detects the
>> DVD ROM as the Pri Master, and the two HDs as 3rd and 4th Master. When it
>> gets to the boot-stage, I get a message ³Reboot and Select proper Boot
>> device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key.²
>> According to the BIOS setup utility, the 1st boot device is Intel Striped
>> RAID. Yet, when I restart  and hit F8 to select the BBS popup menu, it
>> appears that the DVD is still the boot device. I change it to the HD and
>> re-boot and still I get the original ³Reboot and Select proper Boot device
>> or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key" message.
>> 
>> The DVD/CD cable is connected to the blue primary IDE on the motherboard and
>> the two HD are connected to SATA1 and SATA2. From the Main screen of the
>> BIOS setup utility:
>> 
>> -- Primary IDE Master is the NEC DVD RW.
>> -- Primary IDE Slave Not Detected,
>> -- IDE Configuration is RAID (OnBoard Serial-ATA BOOTROM is Disabled.)
>> 
>> Any ideas on how I can make the system boot from the hard drive instead of
>> trying the DVD/CD?
>> 
> 
> 
> I assume that you've noted the existence of a "Boot from RAID" or
> similar option, and told the BIOS **not** to boot from CD/DVD?
> 
> 
>> My hardware consists of:
>> 
>> ASUS P5LD2 ACPI Bios Revision 0901 motherboard
> 
> 
> Which SATA controller chip on this board?
> 
> The reason I ask --- and this was on a Windows server, but would
> apply either way:
> 
> I had a server doing something very similar --- install from CD,
> then can't find its array with both hands.
> 
> Someone I read on the 'net* has a theory --- possibly confirmed,
> that the next generation SATA drives take so long to spin up in
> some cases that the motherboard's BIOS times out waiting on them.
> He claims this to be the case with Seagate and Maxtor SATA-II
> drives (especially those with "Native Command Queueing" or similar
> technology).
> 
> The board in question was an Epox board with the NVidia NForce 4
> SATA RAID controller.  Since this board also had a Silicon Image
> RAID contoller, we tried that and had some success.
> 
> Since we still wanted to use the "primary" SATA controller, we
> contacted our HDD manufacturer and received firmware updates
> for the drives.  After this, they've been quite reliably booting
> for a few days now.
> 
> Kevin Kinsey
> 
> * Try googling first.  IIRC, forum posts on several forums,
> nick might have been "RobertP" or some such...




More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list