FreeBSD on SSD on ASUS P5KPL-C

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 22 Nov 2012, Leslie Jensen wrote:

> Warren Block skrev 2012-11-22 05:19:
>> On Wed, 21 Nov 2012, Warren Block wrote:
>> 
>>> Got a chance to set up a scratch drive and check this.  Turns out I
>>> left out the step of creating a "slice" (MBR partition) to hold the
>>> FreeBSD partitions.  Also, GPT labels cannot be used in an MBR. Fixed
>>> below.  I will probably add this to my disk setup article because it
>>> has come up more than once.
>> 
>> The fdisk/bsdlabel section of my disk setup article has been rewritten
>> to use gpart.  Feedback welcome.
>> 
>> http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html
>
> Thank you very much for your work on this. I have found this conversation and 
> your article very informative.
>
> I've already installed W7 on my SSD but I let the installation program create 
> the windows (MBR) partition.
>
> I'm going to install FreeBSD 9.1 as soon as it is ready so I want to ask if 
> it is straight forward if I follow your instructions for creating the bsd 
> slice and partitions, or if I need to check anything in order to get the 
> correct alignment?

The process should be correct, but it's new, so there may still be 
unexpected inaccuracy.

As far as alignment on MBR, the trick is to use -a when creating the 
FreeBSD partitions.  MBR slices are aligned to CHS values, pretty much 
assuring they will not be aligned to 4K boundaries.  Using -a4k when 
creating FreeBSD partitions inside those misaligned slices will make 
sure the partitions are correctly aligned.