FreeBSD-6.1 bootup hangs after power failure

[Nikola Lecic]

On Mon, 16 Jul 2007 11:57:44 +0545
Tek Bahadur Limbu <teklimbu at wlink.com.np> wrote:

> Nikola Lecic wrote:
> > On Sat, 14 Jul 2007 00:32:54 +0545
> > Tek Bahadur Limbu <teklimbu at wlink.com.np> wrote:
> > 
> >> Hi All,
> >>
> >> Due to a power outage, my FreeBSD-6.1 (i386) machine got rebooted. 
> >> However, upon reboot right after the initial startup menu, it
> >> simply hangs.
> >>
> >> I tried rebooting the machine several times but in vain.
> >>
> >> My Bios detects my hard drive. Also since I get the initial
> >> startup menu, something must be wrong or corrupted in the Boot
> >> loader.
> >>
> >> Can somebody point me or give me any hints about fixing this
> >> problem. I have really some information in my hard drive which I
> >> want to keep or restore.
> > 
> > Hello Tek,
> > 
> > The first thing I'd do is to download FreeSBIE (if you already don't
> > have it), boot from it and do some initial inspection of the main
> > drive.
> > 
> > Then you will probably collect some more data about status of file
> > systems etc. that will allow people from this list to share with you
> > much more useful advices than it's possible at the moment.
> 
> Hi Nikola,
> 
> I just finished downloading FreeSBIE and when I tried to boot it, I
> get the following errors:
> 
> 
> CD Loader 1.2
> 
> Building the boot loader arguments
> Looking up /BOOT/LOADER...  Found
> Read Error: 0x10
> Could not find Primary Volume Descriptor
> 
> 
> Does this mean that my hard drive is dead and gone?

No, this message is not about your hard drive. This means that live-CD
doesn't like your hardware (maybe a bit older if such an error appears),
or actually something much simpler:

... Have you checked the MD5 sum of the downloaded image? This error can
also be caused by one funny thing: what burning speed you used to burn
FreeSBIE? Check MD5 sum and burn it again at <=4x. This can help :)

If you still can't start FreeSBIE, then try any other live-CD or maybe
gparted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net) which can copy/paste
partitions to another hard-drive -- to save your data if possible
before you continue trying to rescue the whole system.

Nikola Lečić