# (Re) Installing FreeBSD after hardware swap



## grocer (Apr 22, 2009)

I did have FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE up and running with XFce4 on a PII 300 and after complaining about fighting with the bios and ram and not being able to get a stable system, my brother gave me a DFI AK76-SN with an Athalon XP 1800+, 512 meg registered RAM, and an Nvidia Ti 4200 (128 meg) to swap into it...I thought "Great, I'll just wipe the drive and start over and it'll all be good."  Well, Ubuntu 8.04 went on, no problem.  I left 20 gig of the 40 gig unallocated.  When I run FreeBSD setup, it lets me create and label the partition. However, after network setup and choosing the base system install, it comes up with "Unable to create file system.  Command line returns 1".  Install then exits on error and tells me to reboot.  If I reboot, the partition is there (as ad0s2a, I think, there is a 19.5 gig ext3 Linux partition and 500 meg Linux swap partition, so it's the third partition on the disk) but the only label that sticks is swap.  Root, var, usr, and tmp show up as unlabeled *.  And it gives me the same "Unable to create file system error".

The drive had been partitioned as 20 gig Linux, 10 gig FreeBSD, and 10 gig unallocated and booted FreeBSD before the MB swap...I decided to just start from scratch, so I reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04, went to reinstall FreeBSD, and had the above problem...


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## SirDice (Apr 23, 2009)

You didn't need to reinstall freebsd after the mainboard swap, just stick the drive in it and boot.


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## tingo (Apr 23, 2009)

Too late now, but it is as SirDice said - you should just have tried the drive with the new motherboard without reinstalling.
You can always check this:
Classic PC's with BIOS can only boot from MBR partitioned hard drives. A MBR partitioned hard drive can only have a maximum of 4 (four) primary partitions. Linux root, Linux swap and a FreeBSD slice (s2) is three partitions. You didn't put anything else on the drive that counts as a partition? The FreeBSD boot loader can only boot FreeBSD from a primary partition. Ubuntu uses GRUB which also can boot from extended partitions (more correct: from a logical partition inside an extended partition), but it won't boot a FreeBSD installation on a logical partition. I don't know if that is what you tried, but it is worth a check.


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## grocer (Apr 24, 2009)

This drive has only had three partitions: ext3 (19.5 gig), linux swap (500 mb), FreeBSD slice (10 gig), unallocated (10 gig).

I had thought it was because I was installing on top of an existing FreeBSD partition, so I deleted it in Linux, formatted it as Fat32, and tried again.

I now can create the partition and label it but I get an "Unable to write root filesystem. Command line returns 36" error... (as opposed to the command line returning 1) so I've made progress, sort of, with a new and different error...any ideas what this command line returns x means?


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## SirDice (Apr 24, 2009)

Remove that FAT32 partition and start the Freebsd install. You will have the opportunity to create the slice (aka PC BIOS partition) during the install.


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## tingo (Apr 24, 2009)

grocer said:
			
		

> I get an "Unable to write root filesystem. Command line returns 36" error... (as opposed to the command line returning 1) so I've made progress, sort of, with a new and different error...any ideas what this command line returns x means?



You can always check virtual terminal 2 (Alt+F2) to see the output from commands performed.


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## grocer (Apr 25, 2009)

The error is:


```
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=84<ICRC,ABORTED> LBA=39070080
```


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