Boot problem

[Polytropon]

On Mon, 20 Nov 2017 16:54:23 +0300, Konstantin wrote:
> I have a problem booting freebsd-box.
> It stop working about six months ago. Loading stops at the first stage, the
> first 20 seconds I still can reboot the machine through ctrl-alt-del, after
> that the keyboard does not work.

What exactly is this "first stage"? The actual first stage of
(classic BIOS) booting is the MBR / boot manager, second stage
is the kernel loader, third stage is the kernel itself, fourth
stage is init. :-)

Also, please explain the system behaviour: Does it hang (i. e.,
become fully unresponsive both regarding keyboard input and
network access, for example via SSH or telnet), does it
crash (and if yes, with which message), or does it suddenly
reboot? Does it do this every time or just occassionally?

In case your keyboard is a USB keyboard which first runs in
some legacy mode (via BIOS), and then using the kernel's ukbd
driver: If the kernel didn't recognize your keyboard, its input
won't reach anything. Can you check the boot messages for the
"ukbd" entry?

Six months ago, did you do something "unusual" to your system,
like replacing a hardware component or changing the OS software?



> I boot the system from the installation flash drive, from the bootloader
> command line I do the following
> unload
> set currdev="disk1p2"
> read-conf /boot/loader.conf
> boot-conf

Does the OS (on the disk) boot correctly, and will it stay
responsive after booting this way?

Have you tried booting from a 11.0 flash drive and using the
kernel from that media (i. e., without the "unload" command)?
This way you could rule out a kernel problem. Additionally,
when booting from USB flash media, does booting the _whole OS_
from that media stay responsive after booting?

Those are at least a few tests you can do.



> How I can repair normal booting?

This depends on what's actually wrong. The information you provided
sadly doesn't help much...



> FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE-p12

That's a fairly current OS version. Is it running a custom kernel?



On Mon, 20 Nov 2017 17:55:04 +0300, Konstantin wrote:
> There are no UEFI on the PC - it`s a 8-years old socket 775 platform. And
> no optical drive.

This shouldn't be a problem, except of course you're experiencing some
kind of hardware failure, which is at least possible at such an age,
but the age alone doesn't imply it. (My home PC is 10 years old and
still working.)



> First I want to try repair without reinstall FreeBSD.

That would probably be the best thing to do, but without further
diagnostics, it's hard to tell what's wrong in your specific case.




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