Solved Missing Operating System...

  • Thread starter Deleted member 13721
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Deleted member 13721

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Lately I moved FreeBSD to another HD. It booted fine then. But lately after starting an update to the latest version of 10.2 (rebuild world) and rebooting to continue the process. I now get "Missing Operating System".

No idea why, haven't updated the BIOS lately. The data is on the drive and accessible through the shell on the installer. Repeated attempts to repair the boot code have done nothing. I don't use GPT because it wont boot from that. The file systems are exactly as they were when I installed it.

No idea what possessed it to do this. So random.
 
World/kernel build does not touch the bootcode. More information needed. Is this root-on-ZFS?
 
wblock@ said:
World/kernel build does not touch the bootcode. More information needed. Is this root-on-ZFS?
Click to expand...

UFS2 file system. ZFS and GPT are no go for certain reasons.

But an amazing thing happened just about an hour ago. After spending hours backing up the current data to a local file server , in preparation to 'waste' the system and rebuild the partitions from scratch. I ran gpart destroy ada0

which appeared to erase everything. Then

gpart create -s mbr ada0
gpart add -t freebsd ada0
gpart create -s bsd ada0s1

The file systems that were supposedly gone all reappeared intact. So on a hunch I decided to try reapplying the bootcode and rebooted the system and whaddya know, the system booted and everything is back to normal.Amazings.
 
Remember that MBR/BSDlabel is actually an MBR partition scheme with BSD partitions inside one of the MBR partitions. Those inner partitions were not erased when you did gpart destroy ada0. That would have required a gpart destroy ada0s1. So when the MBR is recreated, the BSDlabel partition table is already in place, and seems to appear.
 
wblock@ said:
Remember that MBR/BSDlabel is actually an MBR partition scheme with BSD partitions inside one of the MBR partitions. Those inner partitions were not erased when you did gpart destroy ada0. That would have required a gpart destroy ada0s1. So when the MBR is recreated, the BSDlabel partition table is already in place, and seems to appear.
Click to expand...

I don't know what exactly caused that to happen. New HDD, only a couple of months old. But recreating the outer partitions is what revived it. Alot better than the "I reinstalled FreeBSD" solution I've seen around.
 
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