bin/115406: [patch] gpt(8) GPT MBR hangs award BIOS on boot

Dan Naumov dan.naumov at gmail.com
Tue Jan 19 00:02:47 UTC 2010


> 1) Is this bug now officially fixed as of 8.0-RELEASE? Ie, can I
> expect to set up a completely GPT-based system using an Intel
> D945GCLF2 board and not have the installation crap out on me later?
>
> 2) The very last entry into the PR states the following:
> "The problem has been addressed in gart(8) and gpt(8) is obsolete, so
> no follow-up is to be expected at this time. Close the PR to reflect
> this."

Hello list. Referring to PR:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=115406&cat=bin

I have now been battling with trying to setup a FreeBSD 8.0 system
using GPT on an Intel D945GCLF2 board for over 24 hours and it looks
to me that the problem is not resolved. If I do a traditional
installation using sysinstall / MBR, everything works. But if I use
GPT and do a manual installation and do everything right, the way it's
supposed to be done, the BIOS refuses to boot off the disk. I have
verified that I am doing everything right by employing the exact same
installation method with GPT inside a VMWare Player virtual machine
and there, everything works as expected and I have also been testing
this with an installation script in both cases to ensure that this is
definately no user error :)

Reading the original PR, it can be seen that a (supposed) fix to gpart
was committed to stable/8 back in Aug 27, is it possible that this
somehow didn't make it into 8.0-RELEASE or is this a question of the
fix being there but not actually solving the problem?

Reading the discussion on the forums at
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=4680 I am seeing that a
7.2-RELEASE user had solved his exact same problem by editing the
actual PMBR (resulting in "bootable" flag (0x80) being set and the
start of the partition has being set to the beginning of the disk
(0x010100).) and applying it to his disk with DD. Can anyone point me
towards an explanation regarding how to edit and apply my own PMBR to
my disk to see if it helps?

Thanks.


Sincerely,
Dan Naumov


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