Install issues

[Polytropon]

On Mon, 5 Oct 2015 10:18:49 -0453.75, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> I am attempting to provision a new box w/ FreeBSD 9.3R, using a 
> customized USB drive w/ the default install media plus some scripts I 
> conjured up to expedite partitioning/slicing of HDD's. I plugged the USB 
> stick in & powered on. Though the UEFI BIOS gave my no options to 
> configure boot order, it did figure out that the USB stick was there & 
> bootable. I booted from that & the loading proceeded up to the regular 
> FreeBSD 'choose boot options' screen, w/ multi-user, single user, etc. 
> (6 choices total, w/ the ASCII-art logo). I let it go w/ option 1 (bad 
> choice :-) ? ) & it failed to get booted, but gave me a choice of boot 
> devices at the 'mountfs' (or some such) prompt.

mountroot> :-)

It's being presented by the kernel's root partition mounting
mechanism (see sys/kern/vfs_mount.c).



> I entered 
> 'ufs:/dev/da0s1a rw' & it proceeded to boot the installer.

If I remember correctly, the boot process will mount root
read-only, this is the default behaviour of single-user mode.
That's why there is no "rw" option at this prompt; "rw" will
therefore be ignored. Otherwise, the options from /etc/fstab
would apply.



> At 1st 
> prompt, i chose 'Shell' & dropped to the shell to run my utilities. The 
> 1st problem was that the USB media was mounted 'ro', *not* 'rw' as I 
> asked, making it tough to log what was going on to use in queries such 
> as this one when problems arose. My script completed down to an error in 
> an innocuous echo statement, but subsequent df revealed no customized 
> partitions visible for the install to proceed with, & little way to 
> discern what had happened, since everything scrolled past too fast & too 
> far to recover.

The df command will only consider _mounted_ partitions. Check
for the device nodes (and maybe labels) - if they are available,
mount them, then use df.

The command would be "mount -uw /", or "mount -u -o rw /".

The ability to write to / maybe is the problem why no further
partitions got mounted...?



> I never found a magic key-stroke combo to page up in 
> console mode, so I am mostly in the dark.

There is a nice little key, called "Scroll Lock", and it actually
does what's printed on it: it locks the screen (cursor disappears)
and you can use the vertical cursor keys and page keys to scroll
up and down. Press the lock key again, and you can continue where
you left the screen. Maybe the key is so old and so obvious that
you didn't see it. :-)

No, seriously: Scroll Lock isn't supported on many systems to
work as it should. FreeBSD is an excellent exception here.



> Is there a way to force the 
> booted root drive to be mounted 'rw' ?

Probably you can do this with a custom entry in /etc/rc.local (if
the boot image processes /etc/rc).





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