Install issues

[William A. Mahaffey III]

On 10/05/15 10:42, Polytropon wrote:
> 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...?


Hmmmm .... OK, I'll try those mount commands. However, how would the 
installer mount internally customized partitions (partitions/slices done 
interactively through the installer) w/o a writable root ? Or am I 
(badly ?) misunderstanding the install process :-/ ?


>
>
>> 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.

*Booooyah* !!!! That will be *hugely* useful :-) ....

>
>
>> 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).
>
>
>
>
>


-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
	 ever devised by man."
                            -- Gen. George S. Patton Jr.