Unable to boot without VGA-card

Mark Reidel mark at reidel.info
Fri Feb 29 20:11:10 UTC 2008


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Dear list,

2 days ago, I upgraded my router from 6.3 to 7-PRERELEASE, because  I
wanted journaling UFS. This all worked well, because I have two hard
disks. So I created a journaling ad1s1a.journal and copied all the
stuff. This PC doesn't have VGA-card, no slots are free. When the
copying finished, I saw that 7.0 was released, upgraded and rsynced the
diffs to my journaled partition. Then I added

vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:ufs/backup"

to /boot/loader.conf on ad0s1a, so the kernel comes from ad0s1a and the
userland from ad1s1a.journal (aka ufs/backup). Then I rebooted and the
machine hung. Expecting to have done something wrong, I put in my
workstation's VGA-card, booted and it simply worked as expected. As soon
as I remove my VGA-card, the machine doesn't boot anymore. The kdb-LEDs
get initialized, the HD shows an activity-splash and then nothing. I
figure it must boot the kernel and then have problems in the userland.
But neither entering return for /bin/sh and then fastboot, nor entering
ufs:ad0s1a did something, so it's not waiting for one of those inputs.
I don't have null-modem-cable available and setting the system to boot
from sio also hangs it, so I'm really stuck here.
Does anybody have any idea what else I could try?

Regards,

	- Mark
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