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View Full Version : Installed fine, but bootloader can't find kernel


BSD4ALL
10-08-2005, 02:04 PM
I have seen several threads that seem like they may be related. Booting PC-BSD takes a minimum of two things, a boot loader, or something else to point to the kernel, and a kernel that is accessible. Here is a list of fixes that I have found in other threads:

1) Try GAG.
2) Turn on LBA in your BIOS for your hard drive.
3) Turn on Large blocks in your BIOS for SATA drives.
4) Completely wipe out the partition that you want to use for PC-BSD before installing it (fdisk - delete partition **WARNING, this will destroy your data)
5) Make sure the partition you are using for PC-BSD has enough room.
6) Select the option to use the whole hard drive if you can

If none of these work for you, you may be in the same boat that I am in. My problem may still be related to #2&3, but I do not have those options in my bios. I have no problems installing FreeBSD 5.4 on this computer, and it does boot. I have noticed something interesting though:

* I boot into partition magic 8 after installing FreeBSD, and the partition is healthy, it lists it as a FreeBSD partition.
* I boot into partition magic 8 after installing PC-BSD, and the partition has partition table errors.

I am pretty sure that I need a healthy partition to boot? Has anyone else noticed an error in partition magic? How about the people that have the "wrong" LBA setting in their BIOS, is their partition table bad?

BTW, I have five identical computers that I have been using for BSD/LINUX testing, I could send one to somebody if that would help, I would even donate one to Kris Moore :D

HP E-Vectra
PIII 933Mhz
40GB ATA 133 HDD (I am using the whole hard drive)
256MB PC133

BSD4ALL
10-20-2005, 02:16 AM
BTW, I have five identical computers that I have been using for BSD/LINUX testing, I could send one to somebody if that would help, I would even donate one to Kris Moore :D

I sent Kris one of these computers, and he already found the problem, and it will be fixed in 0.8.3. I hope this will also help other people.

Charles
10-20-2005, 02:31 AM
Good - I think there are stoll lots of weird stuff comin'up with FreeBSD being a server OS, all these weird behaviors can be a piece of cake for BSD gurus, but regular people will be clueless. But thank God Kris is fixing all these problems one after the other :roll:

BSD4ALL
10-20-2005, 01:54 PM
I agree, and PC-BSD has a lot of potential, and I will help out any way I can. :D

BSD4ALL
10-23-2005, 04:22 AM
PC-BSD 0.8.3 does fix the problem that I was having :D

kmoore134
10-23-2005, 06:54 AM
Excellent! Hopefully this release will fix all the partition problems people were having with previous releases. I didn't realize that drives can "lie" about their head / cyl count. This should correct these false assumptions :)

Ray
10-23-2005, 07:15 AM
Excellent! Hopefully this release will fix all the partition problems people were having with previous releases. I didn't realize that drives can "lie" about their head / cyl count. This should correct these false assumptions :)

Kris,

Tried to install 0.8.3 and came up with the following error message

acd0 failure READ_BIG MEDIUM error asc=0x11 asq=0x00 error4<abort>

This was with a disk drive containing an earlier PCBSD created on the same computer.

Checksum was correct. Any ideas???

Ray