First boot after install hangs?

Y

yamelesswrench

I am in a bit over my ability, I would probably be a good candidate for pcBSD but the hardware I want to install on is an old 32bit IBM ThinkPad T42, and PCBSD calls for 64bit,

I have purchased a domain name and have pointed it to my home static IP, I am hoping to get a server up and running, nothing serious just for leaning/play (masochist much?). I did this with fedora core 3 (redhat variant) about 15 years ago and I was able to get up on the learning curve then. I am really interested in BSD and want to lean it. I have been trying sporadically for a few months and I keep hitting roadblocks.

latest attempt hangs on boot, last line shown during boot is about the fingerprint reader I think

mountroot> ugen2.2 <STMicroelectronics Biometric Coprocessor> at usbus2


I don't know if that is the cause of the hang, before that it appears to be trying to mount the filestem and failing.

I think this project may have to wait until I can afford some new hardware (or at least newer) but I am hoping someone may know what is going on here and how to fix it.
 
problem happens before
mountroot>
Click to expand...
Something unexpected happend before the line you quoted and mountroot failed. ugen2.2 comes after that.
What install image have you used? Is there anything you may read before "mountroot" line?
 
IMG_20190411_203111 reduced.jpg
 
This mightbe completely off..
But since the boot message shows SATA. Have you tried to change the BIOS settings regarding the hard drive?
 
OK, so you're trying to boot your newly installed system.
The installer went through properly, right? So your new system should be able to boot.

Boot again from the installer medium but instead of "Install" choose "Shell" in the beginning.
Then when you get the shell, display the partition information to see if everything is partitioned properly.
gpart show ada0
gpart show -l ada0

Then try to mount the partitions and see if they work. Depending on your partitions this might be different.
For UFS:
mount /dev/ada0p3 /mnt
cat /mnt/etc/fstab
ls /mnt/boot
cat /mnt/boot/loader.conf

For ZFS:
zpool import
zpool import -R /mnt -o readonly=on zroot
zfs list
ls /mnt/boot
cat /mnt/boot/loader.conf

Do you use encryption? Maybe you did not provide the correct password when booting?
Something which took me a lot of time to figure out: At boot time the password is entered with a en_US keyboard layout! And it can't be changed.
 
yamelesswrench said:
I am in a bit over my ability, I would probably be a good candidate for pcBSD but the hardware I want to install on is an old 32bit IBM ThinkPad T42, and PCBSD calls for 64bit,


latest attempt hangs on boot, last line shown during boot is about the fingerprint reader I think

mountroot> ugen2.2 <STMicroelectronics Biometric Coprocessor> at usbus2
Click to expand...

I've installed FreeBSD on a ThinkPad T42 before and it worked OK.

My instinct is that the problem is with your /etc/fstab
At the mountroot prompt you could try entering

ufs:/dev/ada0s1a

Maybe boot from a USB stick and use https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/using-live-cd.html to check the installation... see what you have in /etc/fstab
 
I want to Thank you all for the help but I think i bit off more than can chew.

I thought since I hadd experience in the past with Unix like operating systems I could jump in to a terminal only system (FreeBSD) and figure it out. But I have forgotten more than I thought.

My wife had 2 identical older low end Dell laptop's, one with a bad hard drive. One with a bad screen (kidds closed it with a pensil inside and cracked the screen) add one Philips screwdriver and I now have one good running low end Dell laptop with double the normal ram and a 64bit processor :)

I went back to the kiddy end of the Unix pool and got Ubuntu installed and Apache up and running, no website yet.

After I learn for a bit I want to come back to FreeBSD, I like a lot of the philosophy of BSD it's licence and cohesive system, I am just not ready for it yet.

I think in the mean time i am going to try to run BSD in a virtual machine on my main pc. That will satisfy the main goal of learning without the headaches of getting it running directly on hardware.
 
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