9.1-BETA1: Unable to load Kernel error message

[sg1efc]

Hello everyone:

Need a bit of help please. Just installed 9.1-BETA1 and did the required reboot. The complete info I see on the boot screen is:

malloc area: 0xcfc76000 - 0xcff76000

FreeBSD/x86 bootstrap loader , Revision 1.1
(root@build9x64.pcbsd.org, Tue Dec 27 13:09:45 PST 2011)
Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf
Unable to load a kernel!
–
can’t load ‘kernel’

Type ‘?’ for a list of commands, ‘help’ for more detailed help.
OK

On an AMD 8-core with 8Gig of ram that has been running PC-BSD 9.0 very well. Any ideas please?

Thanks a lot.

My 100th post, Yay. LoL

[kmoore134]

This is post-install right? Can you provide any kind of details about
the type of installation you did? Full disk? Partition? UFS / ZFS?

[sg1efc]

Hi Kris:

Thanks for your reply, sorry should have tried to think more of what to say. Yes it was post install, I already had PC-BSD 9.0 installed which was running well, did the update per Dru's instructions in the Blog. Received the PC-BSD must reboot to finish message, rebooted and what you see above is the error message saying a kernel was not found.

Original 9.0 install was a very basic install, only used UFS for the entire disk originally for 9.0 and did not encrypt, nor did I do any special/extra partitioning, KDE and Gnome. I did do the New Features for the Impatient instructions recently posted in the Blog, but I did not follow the instructions to get the sound icon working that Dru was kind enough to post, because I read the 'Danger Danger Will Robinson' message:

## sudoers file.
##
## This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
## Failure to use 'visudo' may result in syntax or file permission errors
## that prevent sudo from running.

in the file and am not certain if I needed to use visudo or if I could just save the changes to that file as root? (still a newbie here, lots of laughs.)

Have my second pc which is a Dell 5700 and had also tried installing the Beta, but have not restarted/rebooted it yet, as I figure if I have a kernel problem on it also, I might lose the most recent data on it, so backing it up now = Yep was a bit "impatient" and excited.

Thanks again.

[kmoore134]

We're going to do some additional testing here to see why this occurred.
As far as you remember, you did or did not have /boot on a separate UFS
partition on that system? Its possible it ran out of space somewhere
along the process.

[sg1efc]

We're going to do some additional testing here to see why this occurred.
As far as you remember, you did or did not have /boot on a separate UFS
partition on that system? Its possible it ran out of space somewhere
along the process.

Hi Kris:

Thanks a lot for all your help. It was the very basic install = I did not do any changes, additions or anything to the partitions, or anything else, when I originally installed PC-BSD 9.0 or thereafter. I always check the box to allow PC-BSD 9.0 to use the entire drive. So what ever the default is set to for /boot, that's what I had. (I believe that machine's hard drive is a Seagate or Samsung 1.5TB)

Just rebooted the Dell 5700 this morning and it upgraded just fine. Now that I was able to get through a complete upgrade, might be able to make it a bit more clear as to what point the other machine failed = after I had downloaded the Beta upgrade, PC-BSD Update Manager said it needed to reboot to do the upgrade. Once I did that reboot, that's when I had the above error message = before it could do the step of Clean Old System Packages. However, this may have just been a fluke and I intend on reinstalling that same machine with 9.0 and trying to upgrade it again to the 9.1 Beta1. Will post back here with my results.

Can never thank you all enough.....

[sg1efc]

Update: Doing the 9.0 reinstall now, the following default install options are what I also had chosen for the previous 9.0 install:

Partition: ada0(ALL)
FileSystem: UFS+SUJ
Size: 2000MB
Mount: /

Partition: ada0(ALL)
FileSystem: Swap
Size: 2000MB

Partition: ada0(ALL)
FileSystem: UFS+SUJ
Size: 2048MB
Mount: /var

Partition: ada0(ALL)
FileSystem: UFS+SUJ
Size: 947811MB
Mount: /usr

It's a 1TB hard drive, knew it was something like that, LoL.

[sg1efc]

Reinstall of 9.0 worked fine and I have now gotten past the point of that error message I had posted about above. Computer is now installing the 'system packages' of the Beta upgrade.

Guessing that somehow maybe the upgrade download was corrupted or maybe my system files were corrupted, or something. Anyway I'll mark this thread as 'solved', Thanks again Kris.

[Tripled]

I am getting this same issue on my system with the 9.0 USB Live img, the 9.0 DVD Live iso and the 9.1 Beta DVD iso, during initial boot up of the media.

The DVD is SATA and set to AHCI. The SATA port is on an ASMedia ASM1061 controller.

The USB drive was tried set to 'harddrive' and 'auto' with the same effect. The USB was tried on both an AMD SB950 'controlled' port and on an ASMedia USB 3.0 'controlled' port.

I have also tried "re-burning" the disk and USB img to no avail.

Any suggestion or anymore info required?

Thanks,
David

P.S: I have an ASUS Crosshair V Formula, AMD 990FX - SB950 , AM3+ Motherboard. AMD FX 8150 (8 core) and 16 GB memory.

The system presently works fine with Funtoo Linux. It has had FreeBSD 8? working fine on it as well.

[sg1efc]

Hi Tripled:

I had tried a couple other ways to create the 9.0 USB installer on my Patriot USB stick but had problems, until I found and tried Fatmice's instructions here:

http://forums.pcbsd.org/showthread.php?t=12631

Not an expert but will suggest you re-download the full PC-BSD 9.0 USB image (I always use the full) and use Fatmice's instructions (I used his UNIX-like (BSD) instructions = have a second PC that already had PC-BSD 9.0 working on it). If that goes well, then follow the instructions posted by Dru here to upgrade to BETA 9.1:
http://blog.pcbsd.org/2012/07/9-1-beta1-now-available/

which is how I was able to solve my problem somehow, as I'm still not sure what went wrong the first time or what corrected my problem, LoL.

Good luck & please let us know how it goes.

[Tripled]

Hi Tripled:

I had tried a couple other ways to create the 9.0 USB installer on my Patriot USB stick but had problems, until I found and tried Fatmice's instructions here:

http://forums.pcbsd.org/showthread.php?t=12631

~snip~

Good luck & please let us know how it goes.

Thanks, i did re-'burn' the usb stick again according to this:

ftp://ftp.pcbsd.org/pub/handbook/9.0...063_1851556210

Cheers,
David