SSD woes - boot

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 6 May 2020 11:56:24 +0200, Christoph Kukulies wrote:
> Since yesterday, when I ran smartcontrol against my drives - don’t
> know whether it has to do with that but I’m mentioning it just FWIW -
> my Kingston 240 GB SSD suddenly was no longer visible in the ASRock
> MB’2 BIOS. (ASRock939A790GMH).
> 
> Strange, isn’t it, that a power fail or unclean shutdown/dismount
> can cause the drive being no longer visible to the BIOS.

There can be several other reasons. The firmware in modern SSDs
is rather complex. A possible "firmware hickup" could lead to
what you've been experiencing. It's very hard to diagnose what
actually happened, and why.



> To test whether it was still alive,  I took it out of the system,
> put it into an ICY box and connected it to a FreeBSD (11) VM I
> have running under Parallels on my MacbookPro.
> 
> It got recognized on the USB bus and after I ran an fsck against
> it and put it back into the BIOS, it was recognized again.

Many years ago, I had a similar problem with a disk taken from a
system: No other computer would recognize it. The BIOS would try
to detect it... but no device shows up. I wasn't able to access
the disk in any other computer, not even with the USB forensic
adapter. So I resurrected the PC it was originally working in,
BIOS detect - and the disk was there! So I booted from a live
system CD, started a FTP server, and copied what I needed using
local FTP (directly connected, no Internet involved).

I never found out why the disk would only work in _that_ machine.
This is the reason I kept the particular machine, just in case
I have to read data from a "strange disk"... ;-)



> So far so good. But now, due to some misordering in the hard
> disk numbering scheme in the BIOS I can’t aim at the right
> partition to boot. 
> With the old F1/F5 bootload of FreeBSD it always boots the wrong
> partition . 

Boot the system via CD or USB, and add labels. Put the labels
instead of the device names. In worst case, use bsdinstall or
gpart to re-install the boot manager.



> Is there a better bootloader available which offers me a larger
> choice, that eventually finds all bootable partitions on all
> disks in the system?

You will probably be happy with current GRUB; even though it is
primarily intended for the use with Linux, it works with many
operating systems. It's a very convenient solution for systems
that boot BSDs, Linusi, even "Windows". :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...