Booting Problem

[doug at safeport.com]

On Wed, 30 Jan 2013, Doug Hardie wrote:

>
> On 30 January 2013, at 05:16, Fbsd8 wrote:
>
>> Doug Hardie wrote:
>>> On 29 January 2013, at 07:18, Mario Lobo wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:16:14 -0800
>>>> Doug Hardie <bc979 at lafn.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I have a relatively old machine that I am trying to boot 9.1 on.  The
>>>>> bios will not boot from USB stick.  I am using an external CD drive.
>>>>> It starts the boot process fine and gets to the Bootstrap loader
>>>>> message with revision 1.1.  Then it puts out the machine, date, time
>>>>> the CD was created and starts the spinner.  It spins around about 2
>>>>> times and stops.  The system continues to read from the drive for
>>>>> another couple minutes.  Then everything stops.  Nothing more happens.
>>>>>
>>>>> The CD is good.  I can boot it just fine using the same external
>>>>> drive on another machine.  While I could remove the drive and
>>>>> temporarily mount in in the working machine and build it there, I
>>>>> would like to find a way to successfully boot from CD.  This will
>>>>> become a remote machine and taking it apart later is not a viable
>>>>> option. _______________________________________________
>>>>> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
>>>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To
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>>>>> "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>>>> Can you boot a different OS (Win, Ububtu, gparted, etc ...) from the
>>>> same drive on the same machine?
>>> Not so far.  The drive works fine on other systems.
>>>
>>
>> You said in your orginal post "The bios will not boot from USB stick."
>> I see no reason why you would think your PC would BOOT from any USB attached devices.
>>
>> Since you have another PC that does boot off of usb cd drive, swap hard 
>> drives and use that pc to load FreeBSD to the hard drive. This method will 
>> work for you.
>
> Yes that works now.  But starting this weekend it will be about 100 miles 
> away.  That no longer will be practical.

The CD will not be of much help then either. The problem started with the root 
partition being too small. Just repartition to make sure that does not come up 
for a while. While you have you hands of the machine you should see if you can 
figure out if it can do a pixe boot. You should also see if you can arrange for 
a serial console into the system.