FreeBSD 6.1 hangs at mountroot> during bootup

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday, 21 September 2006 at  7:43:44 +0300, Odhiambo Washington wrote:
> * On 20/09/06 16:47 -0700, Mike Peirson wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> First off, I'm new to FreeBSD and this mailinglist so I hope I am in the
>> right place. Anyways, right now I am having some problems with FreeBSD
>> booting up. I have tried to install 3 times now and keep getting the
>> same error. When I try to boot into FreeBSD, this eventually comes up:
>>
>>         Manual root filesystem specification:
>>                   <fstype>:<device> Mount <device> using filesystem
>> <fstype>
>>                                        eg. ufs:da0s1a
>>                   ?                 List valid disk boot devices
>>                   <empty line>      abort manual input
>>                 Mountroot>
>>
>> This seems to be a prompt where I need to specify the location of the
>> root partition, but the problem here is that it hangs or freezes and I
>> cannot input any text.
>
> Any further details about your hardware specs in general?

This is a keyboard problem.  The background is that the boot process
uses a different keyboard driver from the final kernel, and that it's
much more finicky than the kernel version.  It seems to have got worse
in the last few years.  I've found that a USB keyboard will do better,
but YMMV.

>> At first I thought it may be a result of FreeBSD not properly
>> recognizing my HDD's geometry but I manually fixed that and it
>> still is giving me this same issue. If anyone has had a similar
>> problem or knows how to fix this I would greatly appreciate any
>> help. I looked through the Handbook and googled this but I haven't
>> found a solution yet.

The background for the *message* (not the apparent freeze) is that
your root file system can't be found.  This happens typically when you
change the device name.  For example, my situation is that I'm doing
development with a SATA disk drive and moving it from system to
system.  On my machine the root file system shows up as /dev/ad4s1a;
on the other machine it's /dev/ad0s1a.

It's probably worth putting in a PR about this problem.

Greg
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