fubar'ed it good this time...

[Kurt Buff]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 20:24, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Jun 2011 06:40:27 -0700, Kurt Buff wrote:
>> Your advice sounds reasonable, but that site seems devoted to zfs bootables.
>>
>> I wonder if an 8.1 livefs iso will do the trick...
>
> Check if you can download FreeSBIE somewhere. It's a live system
> using the 5.x and 6.x kernel which should be fine. Next to two
> GUI modes (light, heavy) it also has a versatile "maintenance mode"
> for such operations. I have already successfully used this system
> for solving similar situations, for diagnostics, and for data
> recovery preparation.

The 7.4 livefs CD finds the hardware, and there was much rejoicing!

I mounted the hard drive under /mnt, and I looked at /mnt/etc/fstab,
and it's clean, and I also looked at /mnt/boot/loader.conf, and it's
clean as well. So is /mnt/boot/loader.rc.

However, during the boot process from the hard drive, I still saw
scrolling by a reference to a syntax error, but it went too fast and I
can't see what file was referenced.

So, I started looking at the handbook to see if I could figure out
which file might have been updated incorrectly.

One was boot/device.hints - there was a string of equal signs as the
first line of that file.

How they got there I don't know, but I deleted that line, and that
seems to have helped, because now I don't see the syntax error - but
I'm still getting the mountroot prompt, and it's very possible that
some other error is occuring in the quick boot process before the
user-selectable menu is displayed.

It's late, so I'm going to bed now, but I'll keep working it tomorrow.

Kurt