# FreeBSD won't load /boot/loader



## xcsdwe (Mar 30, 2011)

Hello.
I have a FreeBSD 7 32bit machine which wouldn't wake up from a sleep, so I hard-reset it. It then was coming up with:


```
Invalid partition
No /boot/loader

FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
boot:
No /boot/kernel/kernel

FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel
boot:
```

I loaded the Fixit environment from a FreeBSD8 X64 disk and deleted the screwed up disk label, and used the auto label function to recreate some.
Now when I try to boot it has removed the _Invalid Partition_ part but the rest of the error still comes up.

If I try an upgrade to FreeBSD 8 do you think it will fix this without killing any data? Otherwise does anyone know another methed to fix it?
My live CD doesnt seem to have /usr/ports/sysutils on it so cannot run *scan_ffs* 

Any advice is much appreciated.


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## izotov (Mar 31, 2011)

This can easily mean that your FS is broken (/boot/loader and /boot/kernel/kernel can not be loaded).
If you upgrade/reinstall it will fix this and everything is kept on partitions that you do not allow to format. For example if you have a separate partition for /home then you can reuse that.

What I would do is:

boot from the FreeBSD 7 install CD
get a root console somehow
mount the / partition of the original system
extract base and the generic kernel from the CD to the HDD (you can find very helpful sh scripts in each subdir)
reboot from the HDD and see what happens 
Warning: the method above may cause loss of data...


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