Today, when I started my PC with FreeBSD 9.2 I got this message: "missing boot loader". I'm a newbie to FreeBSD so until now I made a couple of installations of this SO and tried to configure SMB and DLNA (miniDLNA) services but I'm not much experienced, so maybe I'm asking something simple or stupid. In that case excuse me.
I have three disks: ada0 and ada2 are two disks with one partition each for store media and ada1 is the disk with FreeBSD installed, with swap, boot, / partitions. Only later I discovered that the problem may be caused by the "reset" of the BIOS caused by the discharge of the battery of the PC (and so the BIOS tried to boot from the wrong disk), but before thinking that, I thought that something in the MBR was gone wrong and so I tried to restore it (now the setup of the BIOS is correct).
I started a live CD in single user and with
Now, it seems it doesn't "understand" that there is FreeBSD installed on the HDD and if I hit
if I hit
, I guess because there is no CD.
I tried also the command
for each partition of the disk I selected (I put "[....]" instead of the chunks).
Now I'm scared to have lost all data stored (the PC was used also as SMB and DLNA server), and I have a couple of questions:
I have three disks: ada0 and ada2 are two disks with one partition each for store media and ada1 is the disk with FreeBSD installed, with swap, boot, / partitions. Only later I discovered that the problem may be caused by the "reset" of the BIOS caused by the discharge of the battery of the PC (and so the BIOS tried to boot from the wrong disk), but before thinking that, I thought that something in the MBR was gone wrong and so I tried to restore it (now the setup of the BIOS is correct).
I started a live CD in single user and with
gpart show
I could see that every disk/partition is still there and so I tried to reload the boot manager with boot0cfg -B ada1
. This restored the boot manager and now, when I turn on the PC, I don't get the "missing boot loader" error, the boot loader runs and I got the list of choices like this:
Code:
F1 ?
F5 Drive 1
F6 PXE
Boot: F1
F1
or if I don't do anything the result is the same: the system prompts a list of hash signs near F1, like
Code:
Boot: F1 ######
F1
the system prompts a #, and also while the time passes by, the system prompts #. If I hit F5 it returns
Code:
Missing boot loader
I tried also the command
fdisk -B ada1
confirming the change of boot code but denying the change of the partition table but the result is the same. I also tried to restore the boot loader launching sysinstall
from a live CD, I entered in the menu Fdisk
, I didn't make any change to the partition table and when I confirm the utility prompts me if I want to install an MBR, I select one and it returns me
Code:
chunk [....] [....] does not start on a track boundary
Now I'm scared to have lost all data stored (the PC was used also as SMB and DLNA server), and I have a couple of questions:
- Is it possible to launch the SO installed on the PC without the boot loader installed for verify that the SO is OK? For example starting it from a live CD?
- If not 1, is it possible to verify the data stored in the HDD without using the SO in it? (if 1 is possible I can verify the data easily)
- If the data stored are still there and the SO is OK, what could be wrong with the boot loader? How can i restore it?