problem in boot time

none

none

hail,

I have an atom dual 330 intel board and FreeBSD 8.2 installed there. The machine is somewhat unstable (it runs windows xp and I installed FreeBSD 8.2 in it for testing purposes (and I'd like to make it my new file server for my home).

Now the problem, I use usb stick to install, all is fine until I reboot it. I just loses something in the boot code that I just can reach up to the point where appears:

Code: 
F1 FreeBSD
F2 FreeBSD

F6 PXE

default: F1

and when the disk is read, the machine is gone, all is then locked out. I just can't boot anything. To solve this, I must use the usb install, get to fix option and do fdisk -a ad0 to remake it. So next boot all is fine. If I shutdown gracefully the machine, the problem is there again.

Anyone has seen such behavior ?

Info about the machine:

Code: 
$ uname -a
FreeBSD atom.apartnet 8.2-RELEASE-p1 FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE-p1 #0: Wed May 18 16:44:17 BRT 2011     
root@atom.apartnet:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/atom  amd64

Code: 
$ df -h
Filesystem       Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a      9.2G    3.9G    4.6G    46%    /
devfs            1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/ufs/noop    8.7G    7.8G    198M    98%    /noop

Code: 
atom# fdisk
******* Working on device /dev/ad0 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=39546 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=39546 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
    start 63, size 20971377 (10239 Meg), flag 80 (active)
        beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
        end: cyl 1023/ head 15/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
    start 20971440, size 18890928 (9224 Meg), flag 0
        beg: cyl 1023/ head 255/ sector 63;
        end: cyl 1023/ head 15/ sector 63
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
<UNUSED>
atom#

Code: 
atom# glabel status
    Name  Status  Components
ufs/noop     N/A  ad0s2

I really can't say all begun after labeling the second slice. But in that moment I got issues, tried to use sysinstall as usual and got a big problem, just solved using usb install to partition and label the disk.

I'll try again using another disk as soon as I can get one to try. In the mean time, if anyone has a clue ... :)

thanks,

none
 
Check the harddrive for bad sectors. There might be one right at the spot used when booting.
 
SirDice, I copied as much as 10GB to it (it's a 20GB disk) and no problem at all. Nothing in logs.

I'll do a dump and see what comes from it.

thanks,

none
 
Update the motherboard BIOS to the latest version. Intel started with very poor BIOS code, at least on the one I tried. Later versions were much improved.
 
wblock said:
Update the motherboard BIOS to the latest version. Intel started with very poor BIOS code, at least on the one I tried. Later versions were much improved.
Click to expand...

Sorry, I forgot to say I did that right before posted here. I was two version behind. Unfortunately, no luck :(

thanks,

none
 
Hi

I had the exact same problem with a 4GB Sandisk USB stick. I switched over to a 16gb Sandisk USB stick and everything works correctly now. I've tried this 3 different times now, same results regarding the 4gb stick.
 
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