Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:35:47 +0100 From: Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony@wanadoo.fr> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Getting FreeBSD up and running on an HP Vectra XU 6/200 Message-ID: <4010269356.20050222113547@wanadoo.fr>
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I've finally moved all my legacy apps off my Windows NT Server, and so I've wiped the machine and installed FreeBSD. Unfortunately, I can't get it to boot. I've discovered descriptions of my exact situations in archives and on the Net, but none includes instructions specific enough for me to figure out what's wrong. It's like this: The machine is an old but reliable HP Vectra XU 6/200, a dual-processor Pentium Pro machine with 384 MB of RAM and two 4-GB SCSI disk drives. It used to run NT, but I wiped the disks and installed FreeBSD alone on the machine. I used what I figured was a pretty standard setup for disks with /, /var, /tmp, and a swap file on four separate slices on the first disk, and /usr on the second disk. The installation went fine. Unfortunately, when I reboot the machine, it refuses to come up. The screen goes blank after the BIOS finishes with a cursor in the upper left corner, and there it sits. These symptoms are identical to what I found looking around on the Net, but I couldn't find specific instructions to fix it, although it was obvious that it can be fixed somehow so that things run right. If I boot from diskette again and stop in the loader, I see all the drives and their structure. If I unload everything, set the current device to the nominal boot disk (disk1s1a) instead of the floppy, and boot again, the system comes right up. So the problem is obviously that the BIOS doesn't know where to boot, but I'm not sure how to tell it where to look. Both disks were set up with the standard MBR. Disk 0 (the same one that contained the NT boot) contains the FreeBSD boot stuff. Can someone tell me what I have to do to get the machine to boot from hard disk 0? -- Anthony
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