On 10/12/09, Alex Jurkiewicz <a...@bluebottle.net.au> wrote: > Hi all, > A little background: I'm writing a script that will allow me to > restore(8) a standard FreeBSD partition to multiple machines. So far, > I'm at the 'see if it works in principle' stage, and I'm finding > something strange. > > My procedure: > * Start with an empty hard drive (ad0). > * Boot off the FreeBSD CD, enter the live CD filesystem shell (Fixit > -> Live CD Filesystem) > * Create a single slice with fdisk that spans the entire disk (fdisk > -i /dev/ad0) > * Create a single partition with bsdlabel that spans the entire slice > (bsdlabel -w /dev/ad0s1) > * Install the FreeBSD Boot Loader (boot0cfg -B /dev/ad0) > * Format and restore the dumpfile (newfs /dev/ad0s1a && mount > /dev/ad0s1a /mnt && cd /mnt && ssh storagebox "dd > if=home/aj/image.dump" | restore -rvf - > * Unmount /mnt and restart. > > The steps work fine... on physical hardware. The restored image boots > up fine. As a VM guest, running in either VMWare or VirtualBox, it > don't work. Everything appears to go fine, but when I get to the boot > loader, pressing F1 just makes the PC speaker beep at me. > > Any pointers would be appreciated. I'm using FreeBSD 6.4. > > Cheers, > Alex Jurkiewicz
Is the virtual machine using SCSI emulation to boot, or is it using IDE? SCSI drives are da(4), IDE drives are ata(4) [aka ad(4)] If the boot blocks (maybe boot0 specific) point to an ad/ata device, and the virtual machine is SCSI, it won't find the boot sectors. Personally, I use the "standard" boot blocks which don't allow multibooting but I don't multiboot BSD anyway. The standard boot blocks work by finding the first bsd slice, and booting it. I like the keyword find because it doesn't direct the boot blocks to something unfindable. :D Let me know the subsystem layout, and we'll work from there. _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"