mountroot

M

mrmike19597

Hey all,

I was in a tornado last week and my computer was damaged..

All I could save was the hard drive... and ordered a new motherboard, CPU, Memory.. Everything works fine.. but it is stuck at:

Code: 
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad12s1a

mountroot> _

I have tried google and searching in this forum and unable to find out what to type.. I tried samples I could find but they didn't do anything. Tried typing: mount ufs:/dev/ad0s1a no luck.. How can I find out what code/numbers to use? Please help and thank you.
 
That would be FreeBSD 8 or earlier, with static drive numbering. At the prompt, typing ? should show a list of discovered devices. From that, the actual drive number can be determined. Don't type mount, just ufs:/dev/ad8s1a.
 
Look into the BIOS settings of your new board. Does it still emulate IDE for SATA drives, or does it use AHCI? In the latter case, the device ids of the SATA drives are adaX and X starts at 0 for the first recognized HD in the system. Note the second a, so the first HD in the system would be ada0 and not ad0, and the slice a on that disk would be ada0s1a.
 
obsigna said:
Look into the BIOS settings of your new board. Does it still emulate IDE for SATA drives, or does it use AHCI? In the latter case, the device ids of the SATA drives are adaX and X starts at 0 for the first recognized HD in the system. Note the second a, so the first HD in the system would be ada0 and not ad0, and the slice a on that disk would be ada0s1a.
Click to expand...

I'm not seeing anything in Bios about this, I see SATA: WDC plus a lot of #'s for hard drive
I do see AHCI when I turn power on and FreeBSD starts to load.
 
mrmike19597 said:
obsigna said:
Look into the BIOS settings of your new board. Does it still emulate IDE for SATA drives, or does it use AHCI? In the latter case, the device ids of the SATA drives are adaX and X starts at 0 for the first recognized HD in the system. Note the second a, so the first HD in the system would be ada0 and not ad0, and the slice a on that disk would be ada0s1a.
Click to expand...

I'm not seeing anything in Bios about this, I see SATA: WDC plus a lot of #'s for hard drive
I do see AHCI when I turn power on and FreeBSD starts to load.
Click to expand...

What FreeBSD version is on that disk?

If it is 8 or even less, then the AHCI kernel module is not loaded by default. If you could switch the BIOS to emulate SATA as IDE, that would be the easiest way to get your disk working. If not, that would not exactly be a big deal, but it would be a little bit more involved to get the disk running. In this latter case (and FreeBSD 8), you need to start the system from a FreeBSD 9 or 10 Live CD, mount the boot volume of your hard drive to the mountpoint /mnt and add the following line to /mnt/boot/loader.conf.
Code: 
ahci_load="YES"
.

If it is FreeBSD 7 (or less), then you want to consider to set up a new system (FreeBSD 10) on a separate disk, and copy the data from your old disk to the new installation.
 
So if I am on FreeBSD 7 I have to reinstall? I found it in BIOS and set to IDE but still can't find the device number, typing ? just shows no devices listed.
 
mrmike19597 said:
So if I am on FreeBSD 7 I have to reinstall? I found it in BIOS and set to IDE ...
Click to expand...
(Have-To) No, since you found how to set the BIOS to IDE. Anyway 7.3 is quite outdated, and you want to consider to make the switch to FreeBSSD 10 - think on all the security enhancements in the last 4 years.

mrmike19597 said:
... but still can't find the device number, typing ? just shows no devices listed.
Click to expand...
Start from a FreeBSD 10 Live-CD, at the install menu press escape, login as root and then issue the command gpart show. This should tell you exactly the device identifiers of your HD. The disk is there, otherwise you wouldn't even come to see the mountroot> prompt.
 
Can I put FreeBSD Live on USB device and boot from it? New motherboard I got doesn't take connection to my old CD ROM, need one that is for SATA.
 
The problem is that FreeBSD 10 uses relative disk numbers. The first disk is always ada0. That is different from FreeBSD 7 and (I think) 8, which used absolute disk device numbers based on the port. Using Scroll Lock to scroll back in the kernel boot message will show messages like
Code: 
ada0: Previously was known as ad4

Since the original machine is gone and the drive may have been damaged also, I personally would install FreeBSD 10 on a new drive. Then connect the old one and copy data into a backup directory on the new drive, then set up the new FreeBSD 10 system using data from the old one.
 
mrmike19597 said:
Can I put FreeBSD Live on USB device and boot from it? New motherboard I got doesn't take connection to my old CD ROM, need one that is for SATA.
Click to expand...

Yes, there are USB images available from http://www.freebsd.org. However, I recommend mfsBSD instead, which works better and has some additional utilities like rsync.
 
My BIOS also has shell access to boot from, lists files, but wonder if I can find devices in that. Thanks much for the help!
 
This entire thread would benefit from seeing the exact messages produced. A BIOS shell might be UEFI, which will not help with FreeBSD device numbering.
 
Ok thanks, going to try FreeBSD Live, The hard drive is fine and no damage, I had it tested in another box and it booted, just won't for my major change of replacement.
 
Ok, I got FreeBSD 10 CD in and issued the gpart show command.

Got this on my screen:
2w688xv.jpg


And I went back to the rootmount> screen and tried:

Code: 
ufs:/dev/ada0

ufs:/dev/ada0s1

But it just keeps repeating to rootmount> _ .. Can someone please tell me what I am typing wrong? Thank you.
 
Unfortunately, this tells us nothing useful. As I said above, FreeBSD 10 will always show the first drive as ada0. Use dmesg | less -p Previously to find the static device number.
 
mrmike19597 said:
Am I looking in the right place when I see these numbers here http://i58.tinypic.com/2mfdip.jpg
Click to expand...

No. The static drive numbers are those without the second a before the digit(s), and usually on a new installation begin at 4, for example ad4s1a. Device identifiers like ada0 (note the second a) are AHCI drive identifiers.

Please show the output of the following command ls -l /dev/ad*
 
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