No /boot/loader

B

balanga

I ran bsdinstall after booting up using mfsbsd over PXE and installed
onto a new 20GB partition created by shrinking an existing NTFS partition.

On rebooting I was greeted with
Code: 
No /boot/loader

FreeBSD/x86 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
boot:
No /boot/kernel/kernel

Attaching the disk to another system using a USB caddy gpart show shows this

Code: 
       63  117210177  da0  MBR  (56G)
         63   76250177    1  ntfs  (36G)
   76250240   40959999    2  freebsd  [active]  (20G)
  117210239          1       - free -  (512B)

=>       0  40959999  da0s2  BSD  (20G)
         0  39845888      1  freebsd-ufs  (19G)
  39845888   1114110      2  freebsd-swap  (544M)
  40959998         1         - free -  (512B)

Mounting the FreeBSD partition using mount /dev/da0s2 /mnt/ufs and getting a file/directory listing I see:
Code: 
total 20
drwxr-xr-x  5 root  wheel     512 Mar 23 12:44 .
drwxr-xr-x  7 root  wheel     512 Mar 23 13:23 ..
drwxrwxr-x  2 root  operator  512 Mar 23 12:44 .snap
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel     512 Mar 23 12:44 dev
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel     512 Mar 23 12:44 usr

./.snap:
total 8
drwxrwxr-x  2 root  operator  512 Mar 23 12:44 .
drwxr-xr-x  5 root  wheel     512 Mar 23 12:44 ..

./dev:
total 8
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  512 Mar 23 12:44 .
drwxr-xr-x  5 root  wheel  512 Mar 23 12:44 ..

./usr:
total 12
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel  512 Mar 23 12:44 .
drwxr-xr-x  5 root  wheel  512 Mar 23 12:44 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel  512 Mar 23 12:44 freebsd-dist

./usr/freebsd-dist:
total 128328
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  wheel       512 Mar 23 12:44 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel       512 Mar 23 12:44 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  96364744 Mar 23 12:44 base.txz
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  34940332 Mar 23 12:44 kernel.txz

Clearly, the installation process has simply downloaded a couple of pkgs, but not extracted or installed them. It has, however, altered the MBR.

Is there any way I can do a network boot and carry on the installation process now that those two pkgs have been retrieved? For some reason bsdinstall was unable to carry on after getting these two pkgs.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
If you have the disk mounted you could just try the following:

Code: 
# tar -C /mnt/ufs -xvJpf base.txz
# tar -C /mnt/ufs -xvJpf kernel.txz

That's pretty much all the installer does, other than letting you set a few config settings.
You'll probably want to create /etc/fstab although the root filesystem should mount without it.
 
Many thanks for that, I wouldn't have managed to figure that out myself...

I do have the system running now, but on previous occasions when installing FreeBSD alongside Windows, FreeBSD would install it's own Boot Manager allowing me to select Windows. In this case, bsdinstall did not complete successfully, so it did not install Boot Manager. How would I go about installing it manually?
 
usdmatt said:
If you have the disk mounted you could just try the following:

Code: 
# tar -C /mnt/ufs -xvJpf base.txz
# tar -C /mnt/ufs -xvJpf kernel.txz

That's pretty much all the installer does, other than letting you set a few config settings.
You'll probably want to create /etc/fstab although the root filesystem should mount without it.
Click to expand...


Just a thought... if I obtained these two files for any other versions (as well as x32 or x64), could I simply install those versions with those two commands?
 
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