No boot on VPS FreeBSD 13.1

Hi

I have a VPS where I have been running 13.1 for several months. On AMD Epyc cores.
The host will no longer boot after doing a freebsd-update install which was meant to go to p7. Or I think this is related since I have done no other setting changes.

Drives are GPT partitions, all left up to the installer to create on a 160GB HDD. freebsd-boot and freebsd-ufs partitions.

I have booted off live CD and can get to the UFS partition just fine.
Ran fsck and it only reported invalid free block count and corrected it.
All the data is there.

BIOS uses is SeaBIOS and it just sits at this screen:
1678196963292.png



At this point I have 1 CPU core going full hog 100% but not progressing.

I have even tried switching back to the kernel.old in boot, but it doesn't make a difference.

Is anyone able to assist with what I can check to find the issue?
Thank you.
 
freebsd-update(8) never updates the bootcode, you always have to do this by hand. As this system isn't even booting anymore something else is going on.

How often have you restarted the system? As it may have been broken long before the update.

Does the provider have some sort of rescue disk you might be able to boot from? Just to be able to check the disks, partitions and bootcode.

I have booted off live CD and can get to the UFS partition just fine.
Is the the same (or similar) FreeBSD version? Have you tried writing new boot code to the freebsd-boot partition?
 
It's been rarely rebooted. Most of that was during setup.

Rescue system is linux.

The live CD BSD version is the same as the installed version (13.1, but not sure of patch version).

How would I go about rewriting the boot code? With gpart?
How destructive is that process? It's a little tricky to take a backup right now.
 
How would I go about rewriting the boot code? With gpart?
Yes, but this would require a FreeBSD rescue. gpart bootcode -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 ada0 (assuming freebsd-boot is the first partition on ada0).

But in a pinch you could copy a /boot/gptboot from another FreeBSD system and use dd(1) on Linux to write it to the freebsd-boot partition.

How destructive is that process?
Only destructive for the boot partition, which is already broken. You obviously need to be careful not to overwrite the actual freebsd-ufs partition.
 
I'd tend to think that a proper method of maximum data loss protection would in fact be to take a full image of the partitions that aren't associated with the problem boot sector.
 
I backed up to some spare storage before doing the bootcode rewrite.

I did a reply here when that worked, but for some reason I don't see it anymore. Not sure if it was deleted.

But once again thanks to SirDice for the info. It worked perfectly.

Still have no idea why I wound up with damaged bootcode.
 
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