System hangs when booting restored dump.

[Orum]

I am trying to move to a new hard disk on one of my FreeBSD systems. So, I sliced/paritioned the new disk in sysinstall, and did a live dump of the old system which I restored onto the new disks. I followed the FAQ on this to make sure I was doing it in the recommended manner.

After installing the new disk, the machine won't boot because it now sees the root partition as /dev/ad2s1a instead of /dev/ad2a (I didn't use "dangerously dedicated" on the original install, but I did mess things up with boot0cfg and somehow erased the original slice it was installed to). I hadn't changed the fstab, so I wouldn't expect it to be bootable without some manual entry prior to startup, after which I was planning to fix the fstab.

Now normally I would think this is no big deal. At the mountroot> prompt, I just type ufs:/dev/ad2s1a, and I thought it would boot (after asking me where my other partitions were). However, it tells me that it's attempting to mount the root from /dev/ad2s1a, accesses the HD briefly (judging from the LED) and then just stops doing anything. A ctrl+alt+del will cause a reboot, but no other input seems to do anything.

Do I need to redump from the old disk when it's not live? Do I need to drop the new disk in another working system and edit the fstab there first in order to get it booting? Is it something with the slice being present on the new disk and not on the old one? Where do I start?

 

[wblock@]

You can dump a filesystem while it's live, but the -L option is advised. Likely it wouldn't cause a complete non-boot, either. Are you sure you got / put back on the "a" partition?

 

[Orum]

Yep.

# df -h | grep ad2s1
/dev/ad2s1a    496M     57M    399M    12%    /mnt/ad2s1a
/dev/ad2s1d    989M    105M    806M    11%    /mnt/ad2s1d
/dev/ad2s1e    496M    4.0K    456M     0%    /mnt/ad2s1e
/dev/ad2s1f     16G    1.7G     13G    12%    /mnt/ad2s1f

# ls /mnt/ad2s1a/boot
beastie.4th  boot2        frames.4th   loader.4th   modules      zfs
boot         cdboot       gptboot      loader.conf  pmbr         zfsboot
boot0        defaults     gptzfsboot   loader.help  pxeboot      zfsloader
boot0sio     device.hints kernel       loader.rc    screen.4th
boot1        firmware     loader       mbr          support.4th

I'll try dumping again with the -L option, to see if that helps.

Edit:

I redumped with -L, and noticed a few things different when restoring, like

expected next file 47106, got 5
(inode 47125) not found on tape

which one would expect with a live fs. However, warnings like these didn't appear when I failed to use -L, so that could have caused some corruption on my /usr partition. Also, this time I edited /etc/fstab before putting the replacement disk in to boot from. I'm not sure which fix solved the issues I was having, but both together now seem to have FBSD booting perfectly from the new disk.