Broken loader on 7.1-STABLE?

[John Rushford]

Hello,

Perhaps mine is a different issue but I ran into this today.

I loaded FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE from a DVD onto an Apple Mac Pro after
partitioning a drive with bootcamp.  The install went quite well and the
machine came up with no issues.  I configured networking, X, and got gnome
working.  I setup cvsup and loaded the STABLE sources, ran make buildworld,
make kernel, etc...

I attempted to boot into single user to run mergemaster, installworld, etc..
But the machine will not boot, I now get the following errror and prompt:

    Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad9s1a

    Manual root filesystem specification:
        <fstype>:<device>   Mount <device> using filesystem <fstype>
                                e.g. ufs:da0s1a
        ?                   List valid disk boot devices
        <empty line>        Abort manual input

I input ufs:/dev/ad9s1a to no avail and ? Does not list any other devices.

I've booted from the DVD and gone into Fixit mode and can mount /dev/ad9s1a
just fine.  I thought that I'd try putting back loader.old on the off chance
that might solve the problem but, I do not see a loader.old, just loader.
The kernel.old directory is there.

Any ideas on what the issue might be and how to fix?

Appreciate the help as I'd like to get 7.1-STABLE running on this machine.

Regards
John




On 1/20/09 3:56 AM, "Mark Kirkwood" <markir at paradise.net.nz> wrote:

> Reuben wrote:
>> 
>> I was wondering if anyone else was seeing loader (v1.02) break after updating
>> from 7.1-RELEASE to 7.1-STABLE.  After performing the prescribed updating
>> procedure (via the handbook), the system will go through the normal steps and
>> after the boot menu will present the following error:
>> 
>> Can't work out which disk we are booting from.
>> Guessed BIOS device 0xffffffff not found by probes, defaulting to disk0
>> 
>> According to the bugbusting page on the FreeBSD wiki there's two issues at
>> work that cause this behavior; patches were committed to HEAD/RELENG earlier
>> last year in Mar and Aug.  Up until now I've never come across this problem
>> in 6.x or 7.0.  In doing a little research I've come across a few older
>> threads via google where it was believed that the problem was caused by
>> improper CFLAGS in make.conf.  I've commented mine out and rebuilt things..
>> with the same end result.  In fact, if it's any help, my CFLAGS declaration
>> in make.conf is taken verbatim from the /usr/share/examples/etc/make.conf.
>> Furthermore, on selecting option 6 from the boot menu (escape to loader
>> prompt), the system [I'm assuming] crashes displaying a blinking ASCII
>> pattern from which only a hard reboot will work.
>> 
>> FWIW, this is a fairly plain system.. nothing special in sysctl.conf or
>> loader.conf, and the kernel is pretty stock as well (more or less GENERIC
>> with my sound device and pf).
>> 
>> A temporary fix for me was to copy over loader.old to loader in /boot.
>> 
>> 
>>   
> 
> I am getting this too - update from RELENG_7 @12 Jan src to 20 Jan and I
> have:
> 
> panic: free: guard1 fail @ 0x511d
> from /usr/src/sys/boot/i386/loader/../../common/module.c:959
> 
> Can't work out which disk we are booting from.
> Guessed BIOS device 0xffffffff not found by probes, defaulting to disk0
> 
> 
> 
> Copying loader.old to loader did not work around this for me - I had to
> empty loader.conf too.
> 
> Here is what *was* in there:
> 
> ---> begin loader.conf
> # Sound
> sound_load="YES"
> snd_hda_load="YES"
> 
> # IPC
> kern.ipc.semmni=500
> kern.ipc.semmns=500
> 
> 
> # CD/DVD DMA
> atapicam_load="YES"
> hw.ata.atapi_dma=0
> --> end loader.conf
> 
> 
> At this point I am not sure which if are the bad guys...
> 
> 
> The machine is an Asus a8vx.
> 
> regards
> 
> Mark
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