Can't load kernel: Fit-PC
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Try booting in "safe mode" (option 3). This is an easy way to boot without DMA enabled on the hard drive. If you can get past that then a system file can get tweaked to routinely disable DMA on boot.
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I don't get any options to choose from. Only F1 FreeBSD.
How do you get the options. I have tried googling but have come up with nothing.
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OK, forget option 3 for now.
In the startup you should see
FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, revision 1.1
then a few more lines then
Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt
then hit a key (other than enter) to get the command prompt. You'll see a couple more lines of output then
Type ? for a list of commands, 'help' for more detailed help
OKthen type
set hw.ata.ata_dma="0"
which will tell the ATA driver to not use DMA mode then type the command
boot
to boot the default kernel.
If this gets the default kernel started and you complete configuration then you should edit /boot/loader.conf to include the line
hw.ata.ata_dma="0"
so you don't have to keep typing that at boot time.
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Naaaaaaa, not this time.
panic no init
cpuid=0
Uptime=6s
Cannot dump no dump device defined.Then reboots.
It also gives a couple of GEOM errors for ad0, something about boundries???
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You are still having trouble booting off the USB stick? If you are booting off the hard drive did you change /etc/fstab for the change in device name of the root file system and swap space (da - > ad)?
What is on the hard drive now?
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Sorry, still problems booting off USB stick. Haven't got as far as booting off hard drive. (so no pfsense files copied accross yet)
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Sunday I was looking at the Fit PC home page again and saw it supposedly comes with Ubuntu and Gentoo on the hard drive. Do you still have one or both of them? Whats the boot loader?
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Had both on it with dual boot. Lost them when I tried Smoothwall, can't remember what the boot loader was.
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Do you have access to a Linux "Live CD" - a CD setup with Linux in such a way that it can run entirely from the CD? You could boot that and then do a block copy of the USB drive to the hard drive, then try booting off the hard drive.
Maybe a suitable CD came with your system. If not, the "System Rescue CD" which can be downloaded from http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page should do the job. Quote a number of common Linux distribution CDs can operate as a Live CD which would be fine if you already have one but a rather bloated download if you just want a live CD.
Once you get into linux with the command prompt showing the hard drive is probably /dev/hda and the USB drive is probably /dev/sda and you would do a block copy by the command
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda bs=16384
The bs=16384 option speeds up the copy by copying multiple blocks at a time.
There is a FreeBSD Live CD available but I'm not suggesting you use it because you are having trouble with the FreeBSD boot loaders on your systems.
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Can get rescue cd to work. Tried your command, without the # seems to get further. Says drive is full. Do I need to empty the hard drive first? Don't forget it has smoothwall installed.
In Gparted the usb stick is shown as /dev/sdb1 and has an unknown file system on it. It is flagged as boot. Could this be my problem all along, the usb stick not being formatted properly?
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Can get rescue cd to work. Tried your command, without the # seems to get further. Says drive is full. Do I need to empty the hard drive first? Don't forget it has smoothwall installed.
In Gparted the usb stick is shown as /dev/sdb1 and has an unknown file system on it. It is flagged as boot. Could this be my problem all along, the usb stick not being formatted properly?
The dd command shouldn't say the hard drive is full because the hard drive is larger than the USB stick. Exactly what dd command did you type? Given that the USB stick apparently is /dev/sdb, the dd command should have been something like:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/hda bs=16384
If the if parameter had been something like if=/dev/sdb1 it would have meant something rather different, which unfortunately I don't have time to explain now. The dd command should not have any digits in either the if or of parameters.
The USB stick has FreeBSD UFS (Unix File System) which is not understood by many Linux utilities. That may be the reason Gparted reports "unknown file system".
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Thanks very much for your help wallabybob, but I am going to have to cut my losses as it were and stick with the Smoothwall.
Maybe when I have learned a little more about linux (or when freebsd recognises the fit-pc) I will have another go.
Cheers.