FreeBSD 9.0-BETA2 memstick USB image hangs my BIOS

[Matt Thyer]

On Sep 26, 2011 2:33 PM, "Adrian Chadd" <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> On 26 September 2011 12:56, Kevin Oberman <kob6558 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I suspect that the thumb  drive is the issue, not FreeBSD.
>
> I've booted the drive successfully on an older Via C3 board.
>
> I'm now watching it boot successfully on a Gigabyte GA-8I915PC Duo board.
>
> I'm going to try dumping a Linux distro on this USB disk after I get
> PCBSD 9.0-BETA2 installed. That way I can try to eliminate the USB
> disk as being "funny".
> (Although it's quite possible the USB disk is doing other funny things.)
>
> I really do think that this BIOS of mine dislikes a GPT partition
> inside an MBR/DOS setup. If this is the case, I wonder how many other
> motherboard/BIOSes have this problem.
>
>
>
> Adrian

I believe this would be due to the improper GPT partition table on the
FreeBSD memstick (as there is no backup partition table at the end of the
volume).

This was discussed earlier and now that makefs has patches for UFS label
support there should be no need to continue to use GPT partitioning for the
memstick image.

The background is that bsdinstall relys on labels (a good thing) and GPT
partition labels were being used but as there's no way to predict the size
of your memstick, the resulting GPT partition table was not valid (for
strict UEFI systems).

The fix was to go back to traditional MS-DOS partitioning (MBR) but this
couldn't be done until makefs supported UFS labels. Someone came up with
patches so 9.0 should be able to have an MBR memstick and bsdinstall.

I'm not sure how far this has progressed.