Re: [Testbed-admins] Booting error in Customizing the Generic Image

[Mike Hibler <mike@flux.utah.edu>]

On Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 10:58:07AM -0500, Cheng Cui wrote:
> Hi Mike,
> 
> The booting process still fails. Please see the attached picture.
> 
> As this loader is a binary file, can I generally install a FreeBSD6.2 or
> 6.4 distributions on our Sun box and copy such compiled loader into your
> provided images?
> 

Yes, you should be able to.  Let's try this first.  On the machine that
currently doesn't boot, change the BIOS so that it boots from the hard
drive rather than the network (PXE).

When the machine starts to boot it should print out a menu like:

 F1: FreeBSD
 F2: Linux
 ...

This is the boot loader in the MBR.  Normally, we don't go through this
level of the loader, pxeboot jumps directly to the boot loader that is in
the first sector of the partition.  If the machine boots when going through
the MBR, but not when going through pxeboot, then the problem really is in
our pxeboot and not in the disk-based loader that is actually failing.

IMPORTANT NOTE: when you get the prompt above, you will have to explicitly
hit F1.  If you just let it timeout, it will reboot the machine (this is
a feature of our special version of the MBR boot loader.)

> Best Regards,
> 
> Cheng Cui
> . Frey Computing Services Center . Baton Rouge, LA 70803
>