Problems booting 9.0-BETA1 memstick

[Artem Belevich]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Matt Thyer <matt.thyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sep 2, 2011 4:35 AM, "Nathan Whitehorn" <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 09/01/11 14:00, Matt Thyer wrote:
>>>
>>> Shouldn't we use MBR partitioning instead of GPT for the memstick image ?
>>>
>>> We won't need larger than 2TiB installation media for many decades!
>>
>> It uses GPT so that the partition can be labeled, and fstab will not need
> e.g. da0 hard-coded into it. makefs, which builds the filesystem, does not
> support UFS labels.
>> -Nathan
>
> A hack to transparently ignore GPT partition problems on the install media
> might be required.
>
> Or else a utility to fix the memstick partition table.

There may still be fair number of boxes around with BIOSes that do
have trouble booting off GPT. I'm an unfortunate owner of one.
It's an otherwise quite usable Athlon X2 box with Award BIOS from
~2006 which just hangs when it sees GPT partition created by FreeBSD-8
or -9.
Apparently I'm not alone. This page has more details on what exactly
BIOS expects. http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/bios.html

FreeBSD PR115406 should've supposedly fixed the problem about a year ago:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=115406&cat=bin

Unfortunately that didn't help in my case and I'm still forced to use
MBR. Not too big of a deal, but it is a bit of an annoyance.

--Artem