Re: Looking for some guidance

From: Holger Sebert <holger.sebert_at_mailbox.org>
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2023 23:58:21 UTC
On 6/25/23 19:55, Patrick Mahan wrote:
> I run my own domain which lost its main server (hardware issue) about two weeks ago right as I was leaving for a two week family vacation.  While I was gone, I ordered a new HP Pavilion Desktop TP01-3055xt as a replacement and bought from FreeBSD Mall the 13.2 AMD64 DVD.
> 
> The Pavilion is running UEFI, but oddly it wasn't recognizing the DVD as a boot media until I went into the boot menu at startup and specifically selected the DVD drive.  I also noticed that there was also the "Windows Boot Manager" listed which it seemed UEFI was default.
> 
> The Pavilion came with a 500G SSD and a 2T HD.  It seems that Windows OS has been installed on the SSD leaving the HD as available storage.  I have also installed the system disk from the old server (1T HD) but it was formatted for the old bios (no UEFI boot partitions).
> 
> After I booted up the FreeBSD DVD and entered shell mode I see (using gpart show) that
> nvd0 (SSD) shows the following partitions:
>      efi (260M)
> ms-reserved (16M)
> ms-basic-data (476G)
> ms-recovery (5.3M)
> 
> The ada0 drive is my old system disk with the following partitions:
>     freebsd-ufs (/) (50G)
>     swap (16G)
>     freebsd-ufs (/var) (100G)
>     freebsd-ufs (/tmp) (100G)
>     freebsd-ufs (/usr) (200G)
>     freebsd-ufs (/home) (465G)
> 
> The ada1 drive is the 2TB with the following partitions:
>      ms-basic-data (1.8T)
> 
> So my questions are -
> 
> 1) What the heck is this "Windows Boot Manager" and can I use it or must I destroy it?
> 2) Do I need to add the loader.efi to the efi directory on nvd0?
> 3) Can I mount nvd0?  What mount type (FAT32?) do I use?
> 
> That should get me over my first hump.  My current plan is to install to the 2T hard drive and use the old system disk as a reference point to retrieve my DNS/Mail/Firewall stuff.
> 
> Thanks for any help,
> 
> Patrick

Sounds like you have pre-installed Windows on your new Pavillion
machine. Do you need/want it?

If no, then I would suggest simply wiping all that cruft and go
with the FreeBSD's installer defaults (either UFS of ZFS).

Best,
Holger