FreeBSD 6.1 hangs at mountroot> during bootup

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

[rearranged, trimmed]

On Thursday, 21 September 2006 at  2:32:59 -0500, Derek Ragona wrote:
> At 06:47 PM 9/20/2006, Mike Peirson wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> First off, I'm new to FreeBSD and this mailinglist so I hope I am in the
>> right place. Anyways, right now I am having some problems with FreeBSD
>> booting up. I have tried to install 3 times now and keep getting the same
>> error. When I try to boot into FreeBSD, this eventually comes up:
>>
>>        Manual root filesystem specification:
>>                  <fstype>:<device> Mount <device> using filesystem
>>                  <fstype>
>>                                       eg. ufs:da0s1a
>>                  ?                 List valid disk boot devices
>>                  <empty line>      abort manual input
>>                Mountroot>
>>
>> This seems to be a prompt where I need to specify the location of
>> the root partition, but the problem here is that it hangs or
>> freezes and I cannot input any text.
>
> I have seen this in a few situations:
> 1.) the BIOS is set to not allow boot area writes
> 2.) The root partition is outside the first 1024 cylinders.  This was on
> older hardware that didn't do good geometry translation on big drives.
> 3.) moved the root partition to another slice

I don't think any of these can cause the keyboard to freeze.

Greg
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