Stuck on BTX Loader after trying to boot from DVD-R

S

stovejeebs

I burned both the FreeBSD AMD64 DVD1 and CD1 isos to two separate DVD-R's and tried to boot my desktop from both of them. I followed the instructions on the FreeBSD wiki and made sure to use the correct commands to burn an iso to a DVD-R disc.

The box is a HP Compaq with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor.


This message is displayed on the screen and I cannot get past it when I boot from the DVD drive:

Attempting Boot From CD-ROM
CD Loader 1.2

Building the boot loader arguments
Looking up /BOOT/LOADER... Found
Relocating the loader and the BTX
Starting the BTX loader

BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.02
 
I have a similar problem, but I used the DVD option; this was asked >3 months ago, and I'm adding my question. The output is the same except that it stops after the fifth line:
Looking up /BOOT/LOADER... Found
I'm using the FreeBSD 11.2 release installer. Incidentally the console output does not include the first 5 or so characters as the text goes beyond the screen. I occasionally press Enter as a possible prompt is invisible to me. Nothing happens. :confused:
 
Have you already tried other installation media (disc1 on a CD or memstick on a USB stick)?
Make sure it passes the checksum test.
 
My DVD1 media passed the checksum test; I didn't try another medium though. I intended to replace my Debian into FreeBSD before encountering this problem (no problem with Debian, just trying out a new OS). Now my goal is to double boot Debian and FreeBSD on the same computer (I have only 1 PC and if BSD problems happen, I can then use Debian). Instead of iterating my BSD install, I just created a free partition space for a future FreeBSD install. It remains a goal as I'm too busy to try the install again (including expected problems). :-/
 
Don't burn the CD image to a DVD. I've had problems with this too. It probably has something to do with the BIOS treating a DVD disk differently. A CD image burned to a DVD appears to confuse the BIOS or some other weirdness causing it to fail.

Simply put, use the correct media to burn the image; CD image to a CD, DVD image to a DVD and the memory stick image to a memory stick.
 
I'm not so sure about, on every system I've used a CD disk or a DVD disk has behaved exactly the same in a DVD drive. There might have been some problems with early DVD drives handling CDs but you'd expect them to be sorted by now when both CDs and DVDs are becoming obsolete. On the BIOS level there was never any separation, booting from a CD or DVD used the same exact code.
 
I certainly had issues in the past (ran out of empty CDs and figured a DVD would work too) but to be honest it's been eons since I burned anything.
 
I don't mean to revive an old thread, but I eventually figured it out and forgot about my FreeBSD forum post. For anyone with a similar computer, it seems as though booting FreeBSD on the machine is impossible at this point due to either bugs or technical problems with the particular BIOS that the box runs.
 
Ran into a seemingly-hung BTX Loader screen and found this thread. I dd'd 14.2's memstick image to a 1TB USB HDD and installed it fine on my UEFI laptop, but got the BTX loader hang on a Phenom II X4 desktop.

dd'd 14.2's mini-memstick image to a 2GB SD-to-USB stick and it booted fine on the older Phenom II X4 desktop!
 
BTX is not used for UEFI boot, only for Legacy BIOS boot. Can the Phenom II X4 desktop be configured to boot in UEFI mode?
The memstick and mini-mestick images should have the same loader (incl. the same embedded BTX loader). The difference in observed behaviour between the two can probably be explained by the difference in medium size or the way the medium is attached to the computer.
I would try putting the mini-memstick image on the 1TB USB HDD and seeing if that configuration boots.
 
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