Date: Mon, 14 Aug 06 19:24:56 PDT From: perryh@pluto.rain.com (Perry Hutchison) To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: new 6.1 install will not boot Message-ID: <10608150224.AA25564@pluto.rain.com>
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I've just installed FreeBSD 6.1 on a Dell Pentium III, and I must have done something wrong -- or missed a step -- somewhere along the way. When trying to boot, I do not get even as far as the situation described in sec. 4.2.5 of the installation instructions. The system hangs, with a completely blank screen and the curson on (I think) the second line, immediately after the BIOS loads the boot record from the FreeBSD partition. Keyboard input is ignored except for CtrlAltDel, which reboots and hangs again the same way. Booting a Windows 98 CD and running fdisk confirms that the FreeBSD partition is active. I'm not even getting anywhere trying to read the documentation: I can still boot from the FreeBSD CD, but if I try to view the HTML docs from the Doc menu it says this can only be done after the system is installed. (The system *has* been installed, it just won't boot!) Is there any way to recover from this? Even if I were to start completely over I would have no clue what to do differently. If it were a Linux installation I would try booting from floppy, but I did not see any chance during the FreeBSD installation to create a boot floppy.
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