FreeBSD 6.1 hangs at mountroot> during bootup

[Mike Peirson]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> 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
> --
> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.

About the keyboard.. I have it running through a KVM switch, would this 
also cause any problems? I booted into safemode and noticed that the 
problem with inputting text was nonexistant. I am not sure why it  can't 
find my root filesystem. I haven't changed the device name or moved 
anything around at all. BTW, is there any way I can get into FreeBSD 
(maybe via the install disc?) to get a detailed printout of my FreeBSD 
slice? Posting that on here may be of some use.
-- 
Michael Peirson