mountroot problem

L

larrypatrickmaloney

I have a frustrating problem.

I'm booting up release 8, and mountroot can't find, or mount the root slice.

The system BIOS can see the drive. It loads the kernel, but when it comes
to mounting root, the system can't see the drive, or slice.

I get the mountroot prompt, if I hit ? I see NO drives at all.

It's very frustrating, because the problem is intermittent.

The boot drive is an SD card, and if I plug the SD card into an external USB reader, into a specific port, it USUALLY sees the drive.

If I plug the sd card to an internal SD port, (using ant IDE interface) mountroot NEVER sees the slice, (but again, still boots the kernel)

We thought it was the kernel (with some funky optimization, or flags) but if we boot just generic kernel the same thing.

We are thinking it might be a hardware problem, but aren't sure yet.

Any suggestions?:(

PS: I formatted the file system with newfs -L
 
made some progress...

Well, I made some progress on this issue. Not 100% sure of the solution yet....

I am able to plug a 2nd USB device in, and THEN the GEOM label data is read. Looks like the geom label data doesn't get read with just the single SD card installed...

I'm wondering if when I created the disk, I ran fdisk -BI (intialize entire disk for a single slice.

Problem is, I have multiple slices...

I'm going to reinitialize the disk, without the -I option, and see if that works.

Larry
 
If the Freebsd system loaded on the SD card is not a standard sysinstall install, then you have problem with what ever customization you have done. Try installing a sysinstall standard install from disc1 cd and see what happens.
 
Problem resolved.

So the mountroot problem has been solved.

The issue had nothing to do with BSD.

There are TWO separate problems with the hardware. One is with the USB interface (intermittent) The other was with the SD cards. Apparently, there are many bad SD cards out there. I've been to Fry's several times, and I see tables covered with returned SD cards.

Larry
 
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