FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE Booting Problem

Hi,

I've just installed the above on an older SMP Pentium 100Mhz SCSI system.

Its installed, but I'm having a problem getting it to boot correctly. When it gets to the Boot Prompt it lists.

F1: FreeBSD
F5: Disk 1

If I hit F1 (or leave it long enough) it carrys on doing this through Disk 2,3,0, then gets to the boot prompt.

I can get the system to boot by entering 01,a) but this is undesirable and introduces the NLIST problem mentioned in the FAQ, and 50% of the time it fails to mount the root directory and again have to manually type in the obvious.( /dev/da0s1a )

disklabel /dev/da0:

8 partitions:
# size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
c: 17850000 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 8715*)

disklabel /dev/da0s1:

8 partitions:
# size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
a: 204800 0 4.2BSD 0 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 99)
b: 597504 204800 swap # (Cyl. 100 - 391*)
c: 17848288 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 8714*)
e: 40960 802304 4.2BSD 0 0 0 # (Cyl. 391*- 411)
f: 17005024 843264 4.2BSD 0 0 0 # (Cyl. 411*- 8714*)

I've used /stand/sysinstall to re-install the boot loader a few times, done some experiments with boot0cfg & disklabel but don't seem to be any closer to fixing it.

Any ideas?

Jason

Your fsize bsize bps/cpg look very odd and they should never be 0 to all. For example:

8 partitions:
# size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
a: 102400 0 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 # (Cyl. 0 - 101*)
b: 1433600 102400 swap # (Cyl. 101*- 1523*)
c: 16514001 0 unused 0 0 # (Cyl. 0 - 16382*)
e: 5120000 1536000 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 # (Cyl. 1523*- 6603*)
f: 204800 6656000 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 # (Cyl. 6603*- 6806*)
g: 9653201 6860800 4.2BSD 1024 8192 16 # (Cyl. 6806*- 16382*)

Jason I've got a similar problem - I get presented with the freebsd bootloader options,
F1: FreeBSD
F5: Disk 1

and when I hit f1 nothing happens (except it bleeps sharply) - however if I hit f5 and THEN hit f1, all is fine and freeBSD boots up. I'm thinking about reinstalling anyway and playing around a bit, just to get more familiar with this slicing business(!).

After some playing and reinstalling a few times, I found that installing a small DOS partition (10mb) on my first IDE drive actually seemed to resolve my booting problems (I have two 1.6Gb HDD, both master on respective IDE controllers).

The other option which I've just read about might be to consider using a /boot.config file containing the string you have to use to boot successfully from the boot prompt ('1:ad(0,a)/kernel' for me).

I found this info reading through the installation sections of the FAQ and handbook.