Bonehead beginner mistake: It wasn't trying to boot off the 40 GB drive, it was booting (or trying to) off the Seagate 750 GB drive. Yes, I should have mentioned that -- I assumed I knew what I was doing. See, I had the 40 GB drive on the IDE connector, which was showing up first in FreeBSD's list of drives to install on, so I figured that was first in the boot order too, which it wasn't according to the BIOS setting which I eventually looked at. The other two drives are SATA 750 GBs. I previously had no IDE hard drives in the system, so this didn't arise.
Sigh. Thanks for all the suggestions, and sorry for dissing FreeBSD (if anyone out there was offended)!
I can now SSH into the system.
Sean Cody wrote:
There maybe something weird with the disk. A dmesg would be helpful but that's kind of hard to get if you can't get the boot-loader to work.
If you can format the fdisk/format the disk using a linux live cd or something. Another method would be to DD the first MB of the disc and reboot. You need to reboot to refresh the in-kernel geometry, not sure how to reload the kernel config without rebooting or hot plugging the disk.
My other suggestion would be to try another drive if you have one around. The motherboard in question has no FreeBSD 7 dmesg submitted but it seems to work with 6.2 (there were huge disk related changes between 6.2 and 7 so no assumptions can be made there).
On 14-Apr-08, at 7:20 PM, Kevin McGregor wrote:
The motherboard is an ASUS M2A-VM with both SATA and PATA. I've been trying to install to the WD400 (~40 GB) PATA drive (master, CD-ROM is the slave). It seems to work fine during the install.
Yeah you can tell sysinstall to disregard the in-kernel geometry but I've only had that work once. It pretends the drive is ok but is misaligned and the boot record isn't in the right place not to mention even if the boot loader worked, mount would freak out about it.