# [FreeNAS] New to BSD. Simple looking installation problem.



## sarkore (Sep 3, 2012)

Hi and thank you for taking time to look at my problem. 

I have recently installed freeNAS on a HP microserver. Originally I was running freeNAS directly from a USB stick but the I/O speeds were causing problems. So i decided to try and install freeNAS on a hard drive in the system but freeNAS was not giving me the option to install to a hdd.  (Here's an example of the options I was getting in freeNAS http://i.imgur.com/Kg55D.png Clearly not giving me te option to install)

So to get around this I took a drive out of the freeNAS box and put it in my tower, burned freeNAS to a disk and installed it to the drive like that. But when the drive with the operating system went back into the freeNAS box, I received a ROOT MOUNT ERROR problem. My guess is that the freeNAS was installed on a different machine and now my microserver cannot start it? 

I have been trawling through the forums and found a pretty unanimous solution http://i.imgur.com/mhGsW.jpg

So my question is, how do I access the loader.conf file mentioned in the screenshot to change this option.

I am really new to this so apologies if this is a really silly question. 

Thanks again.


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## SirDice (Sep 3, 2012)

[thread=7290]Topics about PC-BSD | *FreeNAS* | DesktopBSD | m0N0WALL | pfSense | Debian GNU/kFreeBSD[/thread]


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## unAmygdala (Sep 3, 2012)

*probably not related to acpi*

It's my understanding you want to move a non-freebsd os that's like or based on freebsd from a booting removable media onto a booting internal drive.

I think acpi is related to hardware used by the os after its installed and changing boot loader parameters won't help your problem.  Before the os loads anything it needs to find the correct boot sector.  My guess is that your usb was formatted as one kind of file system and the hdd in your box has different drive parameters or things that prevent it from being able to boot from the same image.  

In my limited experience, getting fbsd images to boot correctly when moving boot media from one media to another or changing the size of the partition/slice the boot media is on is a more advanced FreeBSD issue.  You might be better off looking for the install media for your HDD and doing a fresh install and them moving over the configuration files onto the new and booting os.

Can you wipe the drive on the new server, boot the new server with live media and use that to install directly on the drive on the new server instead of installing the os on one computer and then moving the drive with the installed os to another computer?  That might help fix why the new oss boots in the tower but not when you move the hdd to the server.

- unAmygdala

# fortune -a
It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens,
to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.
                -- Marcus Porcius Cato


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## Terry_Kennedy (Sep 8, 2012)

unAmygdala said:
			
		

> I think acpi is related to hardware used by the os after its installed and changing boot loader parameters won't help your problem.


ACPI != AHCI. Lots of similar-looking acronyms in the computer business, and a mistake I've made myself on occasion.

As SirDice points out, questions about the projects derived from FreeBSD will generally get a better response in those project forums rather than here.

If this were a vanilla FreeBSD system, I'd boot from the live filesystem CD, use the fixit menu option to get to a shell prompt, then mount the root partition of your hard drive and edit the /boot/loader.conf file with vi, save and exit, then exit all the way back through the CD menus. The last exit will eject the CD and reboot the system - if all goes well, it will now boot from the hard drive.


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## wblock@ (Sep 8, 2012)

Moving a drive from one system to another can cause device numbers to change, like ad0 becoming ad4.  This is less of a problem with FreeBSD 9.0 and later, where disk devices usually use relative numbers and the first drive is ada0.

The fix is to use labels, which remain the same regardless of how or where the drive is connected.  Filesystem labels are shown in FreeBSD Labeled Filesystems.  They are an option only for UFS filesystems.  GPT labels are more general, applying to partitions.  They are shown in Disk Setup On FreeBSD.


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