# Cannot boot after moving FreeBSD to another disk



## bboldi (May 8, 2012)

I'm fairly new in FreeBSD, but I already love it  Actually I love it so much, that I have decided to move it to my SSD drive where Windows7 used to be. I have formatted the drive, created two partitions FS and Swap, then dump/restore'd it from the HDD to SSD, made the partition bootable (sysinstall/fdisk) and changed fstab to match the new disk name, but I cannot boot from the device. When *I*'m trying to boot FreeBSD from SSD I get:


```
Invalid Partition
No /boot/loader

FreeBSD/x86 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
boot:
invalid partition
No /boot/kernel/kernel
```

*P*lease tell me what can be the problem - any tip is much appreciated!


----------



## tingo (May 8, 2012)

*T*ip: you have moved to another drive. This drive has a different number and name than the first one. You need to update your FreeBSD installation so it knows the name of the drive to boot from, and you also need to update /etc/fstab, most likely.


----------



## bboldi (May 9, 2012)

Thanks you @tingo! Can you please tell me what do you mean by "updating FreeBSD installation" concretely? Because I have been experimenting with a lot of stuff after the insal, and non of them helped... THANKS!


----------



## tingo (May 9, 2012)

The bit about the boot loader is in the Handbook, here: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/boot-blocks.html

Every FreeBSD user should know about the Handbook, and learn how to find stuff in it.


----------



## bboldi (May 10, 2012)

@tingo Thanks  Noted!


----------



## bboldi (May 11, 2012)

*Solved!*

The drive label needs to be 'a' if you want FreeBSD to boot from it. Mine was 'd' ... here is how you can solve this: my slice name was ada0s1. So I boot from LiceCD and enter [cmd=]bsdlabel -e ada0s1[/cmd] change '*d*' label to 'a'. Then 
	
	



```
mkdir /mnt/ssd
mount /dev/ada0s1a /mnt/ssd
```
 and then edit /mnt/ssd/etc/fstab and change the mount point of / to ada0s1a. That helped!


----------

