On Sat, 18 May 2019 08:02:20 -0500 Scott Bennett <bennett at sdf.org>
wrote:
> I have been running 11.2-STABLE for a while at r345498. Last weekend
it crashed,
>so I took the opportunity to install the most recent build I had lying
around, r347182.
>I created a new boot environment and installed the r347182 kernel into it,
shut the
>system down, and rebooted. The new kernel came up and appeared to be
working okay, so
>I continued with the mergemaster -p -F, make installworld, and mergemaster
-F, then
>shut it down again, and rebooted. It asked for the GELI key for the boot
pool, which
>I then entered. The spinning slash cursor appeared and may have changed for
one frame
>or so, and then I got a message beginning with "BTX" and followed
by several lines of
>hexadecimal, and then it stopped. I tried it again just to be sure, and the
result was
>exactly the same.
> Does anyone know whether the PMBR boot block or the loader in the
freebsd-boot
>partition changed between r345498 and r347182? I found no warning in
/usr/src/UPDATING
^ I wrote the revision down wrong
in my
notes. It was really r347183.
>about installworld potentially leaving a wasted system, so I don't have
a clear idea
>of what went wrong, much less whether I missed some instruction somewhere
about source
>updates. If anyone can lend me a clue here, I would greatlyappreciate it.
I only had
>one working machine, and now it is only working in a "rescue" mode
by booting from a
>DVD. (Probably needless to say, but I will burn new DVDs with up-to-date
stuff as soon
>as my system is working the way it is supposed to again.)
> This motherboard is nearly 11 years old and does not boot from USB (in
spite of
>the BIOS menus say), so at the moment I am logged into SDF by running a long
out-of-date
>TrueOS installer DVD, which happens to be a pain to get to boot all the way,
but I've
>figured how to make it do it rather than get stuck with a logo on the screen
that never
>goes away. Unfortunately, it includes no software to burn a CD or DVD, so I
cannot
>make a new bootable disk for the time being. I will check email much later
today or
>this evening.
So far I've received one reply, which was not copied to this list, yet
the person
responding suggested something to try and also adked that I post the result to
the list.
I would have done both anyway, but the respondent may have desired anonymity on
the list,
so I am not quoting the message I received.
The suggestion was to wait about a second after entering the GELI
passphrase and
then hit the space bar on my keyboard. At the resulting prompt, I should enter
the path
given in the prompt, but with ".old" appended. I did that, and YES!!!
It worked and
proceeded until I had a boot menu. I opted for single-user mode and then
responded to
further requests for GELI passphrases until eventually I had a root shell.
Being unable
to reach the boot menu was a problem hadn't previously even crossed my mind.
I certainly
hope that doing updates from source in the future will not cause this same booby
trap
again.
At that point I renamed /boot/zfsloader to /boot/zfsloader.bad.r347183 and
/boot/zfsloader.old to /boot/zfsloader. I also added a hard link to the latter
as
/boot/zfsloader.good.r345498.
All is still not well, however. In multi-user mode, startx turns the
screen black
and switches its power setting to standby. After that it remains unresponsive
until I
log in via a different vt and send SIGHUP to xorg. After a rather lengthy delay
(30-60
seconds, at a guess) it returns to the login session on the console vt. I have
now
commented out the "kld_list="/boot/modules/radeonkms.ko" line in
/etc/rc.conf.local in
hopes that the next boot will get the scfb driver to take it instead of the
radeonkms
driver from graphics/drm-next-kmod. If someone knows, is this a case where
rebuilding and
reinstalling graphics/drm-next-kmod? If so, then I will do that, but I see that
the
Makefile still appears to use the same distribution file.
Many, many thanks to the person who responded with the solution to get past
the
loader crash!! My system is now getting work done again, and the rest of the
new
problems can be dealt with on a running system.
Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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