2.4.1 No-boot after restoring config - System hangs at "Trying to mount root"
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I've got a pfSense running 2.4.1 as a KVM virtual machine. I want to go to physical hardware, so I got a box and installed pfSense on it. I made sure I upgraded both the old and new pfSense to 2.4.1 (latest stable).
I then downloaded the config from the KVM virtual machine and restored it to my physical machine. There were some interface mismatches (KVM uses vtnet0,vtnet1 etc versus igb0, igb1 etc on my new box) which I fixed. I then clicked "Save" then "Apply" - the machine then rebooted.
When it came up, it wouldn't go any further than
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ufsid/5a12b366f9622119 [rw]...
It would sit there indefinitely (see photograph)…
What's going on here? Let me know if I need to post any additional info to help diagnosis.
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Ok, this is fixed now. Somewhat.
I reinstalled pfSense from a USB Stick using UEFI mode and using a ZFS file system on the SSD. I then restored my config - all working nowl
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I got to the bottom of this - it appears my config file has something in it that makes pfSense not like it. Installation of pfSense, first boot and subsequent reboots work OK, but as soon as I restored my config the system hangs on that "Trying to mount root from" message.
Numlock etc still works so the system isnt frozen, just pfSense. A short press of the power button even initiates a graceful shutdown and I see the "Syncing vnodes" message that youd normally see.
In the end, I backed up my pfSense config from my existing virtual machine instance of pfSense, then restored the config piece by piece - i.e. I restored one item at a time - first I did "interfaces", then "system", so on and so forth until I got everything.
Is there any way I can view a verbose log of why the boot isn't proceeding as per normal? This would be considerably easier than the trial and error process I had to adopt.
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https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=138080.msg756687#msg756687 some patience may help too.
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I came upon that very thread. I left it for over 2 hours without success.
BUT, the system is not frozen. I came back after 2 hours, and short-pressed the power button - and the "Syncing vnodes" message came up and the system powered off gracefully. If it is indeed hanging because of pfBlocker (which incidentally, I do have installed), then there should be some log entries somewhere surely?
Is there some way to access the "console" mid boot to see what is going on? I'm using the "vga" version of the image so I don't think the info is going to the serial console or anything.
Basically after I restored my config file the pfsense became a brick. No ping to the LAN interface at all, no boot, no response from keyboard if I press enter or anything (but numlock works). The only fix was to reinstall (or to manually edit the config.xml I suppose but that doesn't fix the underlying problem).