Duh: [RndTbl] FreeBSD 7 install -- help required!

[Kevin McGregor]

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.
>