Can't boot machine after upgrade

[Polytropon]

On Fri, 9 Jan 2009 14:54:55 +0000, Frank Shute <frank at shute.org.uk> wrote:
> I tried booting a FreeBSD CD & going into sysinstall & then fdisk but
> it said it couldn't find any disks.

Ah! This means something like "the disk *really* can't be accessed".
You can easily conclude from

	% dmesg | grep ^ad

if any disk is present, or use

	% atacontrol list

to see what's on the HDD controller.



> freesbie.org is unfortunately down :(

The diagnostic means of a bootable FreeBSD installation CD should
be sufficient at first - to eleminate or confirm the idea that the
disk is not present.

Now, check settings in CMOS setup, check wires, eventually check
hard disk in another system, and / or put another disk into the
system you want to boot ("cross-checking") - the latter one not
to install anything, but to see if the disk is recognized correctly.



> I'm not using GENERIC but IIRC I've only stripped out NIC's etc.

Then I think the only thing missing could be the ad driver or
something it depends on, but that's nearly impossible to miss. :-)



> I booted with booting verbose and it's showing this before it jumps to
> the mountroot> prompt:
> 
> ata1: SATA connect time=0ms
> ata1: SIGNATURE: eb140101
> ata1: ahci_reset devices=0x4<ATAPI_MASTER>
> ata1: reinit done ..
> ata2: reiniting channel ..
> ata2: SATA connect time=0ms
> ata2: SIGNATURE: 00000101
> ata1: ahci_reset devices=0x1<ATA_MASTER>
> ata2: reinit done ..
> ata2: reiniting channel ..
> 
> *repeats*

I see you're using a SATA disk. I don't have such ones, so I'm not
sure if they maybe require something in the kernel?



> ATA PseudoRAID loaded

PseudoRAID, only one disk? Hmmm... eventually check BIOS again.



Finally, I think the problem occurs this way: The ad0 disk can't
be recognized, so the access to ad0s1a won't work. You should
try to get access to ad0. Maybe some cross-checking will help,
just in case you're having a damaged hard disk...



-- 
Polytropon
>From Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...