FreeBSD 9.0-BETA2 memstick USB image hangs my BIOS

[Matt Thyer]

On Sep 28, 2011 4:11 AM, "Nathan Whitehorn" <nwhitehorn at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> On 09/27/11 08:24, Matt Thyer wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> I don't believe these patches were ever committed. Could you provide a
pointer to them?
> -Nathan

Yes, it was Andriy Gapon in this message:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?db=irt&id=4E60F480.6040706@FreeBSD.org