I am trying out freeBSD for the first time and got the PC-BSD full DVD (non-live). I selected "use all disk" and ZFS during install. No problems with the install except I had to toggle "VESA" on otherwise I got a black screen (MoBo is 64-bit Asus AT5NMIOT-I which has only VGA and Intel GMA 3150 graphics). Have checked MD5 of install ISO and verified DVD after burned. (BTW, I don't know if I can just select VESA permanently and use it like that - unfortunately it is set to "disabled" at every reboot).
Anyway, the first time I started it after install, it looked nice with pretty desktop and all, and the first question I got was to decide on graphics (resolution etc). I selected "OK" to the suggested settings and it was supposed to try the settings for 15 secs or so and then revert if I didn't confirm it was OK. But it never reverted, and being blind I pulled the plug and rebooted. No big deal, everybody reboots all the time, right?
From now on when I try to boot, it stops at the point when it has just written "mountroot>", and that section starts with the headline "manual root filesystem specification", which is preceded by a long list of all devices it could find ending with "SMP: AP CPU #3 Launched!". And I had to go find an old PS/2 keyboard cause at this point my USB keyboard won't work. No matter what boot menu item I select I get stuck here (except "Escape to loader prompt" but I can't find any useful commands there).
I have looked at these two threads:
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=26549
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=26024
So I tried zfs:tank, zfs:tank0, zfs:zroot, zfs:/dev/ada0, zfs:/dev/ada0s1, zfs:/dev/ada0s1a, zfs:/dev/ada0s1b, zfs:/dev/ada0s1d, and all give "error 2 unknown file system". Also tried ufs:tank and ufs:tank0 just for fun, it had to think for a couple of seconds then and said "error 19" no details. I also tried changing SATA connector.
Then I found this thread:
http://forums.pcbsd.org/showthread.p...ight=mountroot
I used the DVD to go to Emergency / Shell. I note that
ls /mnt is empty, should it be? I tried
mount /dev/label/boot0 /mnt, got warning that file system isn't "clean" and should run
fsck. I tried
fsck -y -t zfs /dev/ada0, got error "no such file or directory". I'm not sure about device names in Unix/FreeBSD, but ada0 exists in /dev/ and I have only one hard disk drive and one DVD drive so shouldn't ada0 be the right name? (And e g ada0s1a is a partition on ada0, if I understand naming conventions correctly?)
I'm also not sure how to tell contents on different drives apart in Unix. In DOS you have the C: and D: etc that says which device to look at (e g
dir d:\whatever), as I understand it all devices are found with
ls under the root, I assume different directories in the root are for different devices, but how can I see which device that is used for a specific directory?
I suppose I could reinstall it, it took 2h45min (I selected a lot of extras to test out) plus time to make selections, but I feel I really have to have a way out of this situation in case it happens in the future when the disk is full of data. Perhaps a good opportunity to learn something..
mountroot> at first boot
Linear Mode
