My #FreeBSD #desktop was knocked out yesterday. It didn't #boot (looking like the harddisk was completely empty). I feared I'd have to buy new hardware, which I don't want because I'd lose my parallel port, but that's a different story. In the evening, I finally had the time to have a look. First thing, ssh into my builder machine and fire up make -C /usr/src/release memstick.img, then dd that to some stick. That got the machine to boot again. I just love the #shell you can get from a FreeBSD #installer image! gpart showed a corrupted partition table. Awesome thing you can restore it from a backup at the end of the device with #GPT. After that, FreeBSD's #loader asked my for a #GELI passphrase! 🥳 So, all good? No, still didn't boot. The reason, for some bugs in the #EFI implementation of my old board, I'm booting with "legacy" BIOS #MBR method. Took another geli bootcode to install /boot/pmbr again. Then, everything was fixed. So in the end, only the very first block of my disk was overwritten with ... whatever. It worries me that I have no idea how and why this happened. 😳 But I'm very happy to have my working desktop back! 🤩