# Unable to boot FreeBSD from USB external Hard Drive



## ravi (Oct 27, 2011)

I have a Seagate 500MB external hard drive. I have installed FreeBSD 8.1 (minimal) from a CDrom. During installation I specified that I would like FreeBSD boot loader to be installed (as I was planning to booth alternate OS if future).

At the time of installation the disk was clean with 100G set aside for alternate OS. The remaining part was used by FreeBSD. The slicing is done with "Auto" option. Installation was completed successfully. On booting ... I get the menu of options:


```
F1   FreeBSD
F6   PXE
```
When I press "F1" key I get the prompt

```
Boot:   F1
```
with a blinking cursor.   I am a little puzzled as to why the boot process hangs.

I made sure that the USB interface is working on my LAPTOP ... Was able to use the same hard drive and install other OS and they all bootup.


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## jb_fvwm2 (Oct 28, 2011)

I am only guessing: 1... sysinstall 8.1 installed to a partition scheme which needs "legacy" drivers (geom_bsd.ko geom_mbr.ko geom_label.ko) but they are newly not installed by 8.1 and need to be put in /boot/loader.conf; 2... a card slot in the laptop hold a device which irq conflicts with the usb bootup 3... not enough usb drivers loaded (similar to point #1) 4... a cdr is still in the drive (similar to point #2) (I've encountered three of those, but do not know if they apply here specifically, I recall less of the details as time goes on.)


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## T-Daemon (Oct 28, 2011)

If you are planning to boot another OS in the future, the installed FreeBSD boot loader needs to be reinstalled, because it can't be configured. It is a very simple, in certain circumstances, not very reliable boot loader.  Better use a more sophisticated one, for instance sysutils/grub2.

To get rid of the FreeBSD boot loader, boot into a FreeBSD LiveCD session,
and execute: `# fdisk -B ad[b]x[/b]` (*x* is the number of the USB hard disk's device node), or reinstall FreeBSD and choose "Standart" in the "Install Boot Manager â€¦" menu


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## ravis (Oct 30, 2011)

Now this explains why I failed to boot even after re-installing OS without dual boot option. Does it mean that my laptop uses a legacy USB interface? The hard drive is a brand new model with USB3 capability and claims backward compatibility with USB2.


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## granowski (Dec 4, 2011)

*DragonFly*

For the record, I tried to isntall DragonFlyBSD and I'm using the same external usb 3.0 Seagate (GoFlex) drive and after DragonFlyBSD properly installed, I was unable to access this harddisk device from my BIOS's boot menu even though all of my other usb devices (flash or hdd) show up in the boot menu. I'm guessing the usb 3.0 interface (or something with the GoFlex interface) disallows access to my device from the BIOS's perspective.


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## granowski (Dec 4, 2011)

Whoa! Update... I found out that my Android device being plugged into my computer was blocking all the other devices from being seen by my BIOS.


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