Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 21:52:34 -0500 From: Chris Shenton <chris@shenton.org> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Boot fails: Default F1? hangs. Trashed MBR? replaced FBSD mbr. Message-ID: <86acqt6j65.fsf@PECTOPAH.shenton.org>
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I rebuilt my kernel in 5.3-STABLE from CVS, installed as normal. When I rebooted, the BIOS said "No system disk, insert and reboot" or something. Ug, hosed. Then I recalled I was trying to figure out how to write to a new ATAPI CD burner, but used one of the SCSI burner utils; it failed but I suspect I had specified and hosed something in my SCSI disk which is the only disk I have, where the OS lives. I suspected I had trashed the Master Boot Record. So I booted from floppies, went to Wizard mode, did the Install FreeBSD Bootmanager. Rebooted. Now it halts at the prompt "Default: F1" and beeps when I hit any key, like RETURN, F1, etc. Since my system was running fine until the reboot, and because I installed a newly built kernel, I suspect what's on the disk is mostly good but I've trashed the low level boot stuff. That arcana is beyond my understanding. :-( I'd like to be able to recover, get it to boot, without having to reinstall from CD ISO -- without overwriting all my hairy configs (the box was a print server for the house for FreeBSD and Mac, amongst other things, and got a lot of it's /usr/local type of stuff from my main machine over NFS -- painful to re-create properly). What is it not finding when it waits at the "Default: F1" prompt? Any guru suggestions for how to recover gracefully? Thanks a bunch.
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