"Invalid partition table" on 10-stable. Solved. Ish.

Nathan Whitehorn nwhitehorn at freebsd.org
Fri Sep 19 16:57:39 UTC 2014


On 09/19/14 04:49, Frank Mayhar wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 21:11 -0700, Frank Mayhar wrote:
>> Someone please give me a hint of what's going on here.  I just got a
>> Dell Precision M6800.  It's not doing UEFI, it's all legacy.  I pulled
>> the installed drive and dropped in a Seagate hybrid 1T drive, then tried
>> (and tried, and tried, and tried) to install 10-stable on it.  I'm using
>> a memstick image, btw.
>>
>> No matter what I try and no matter whether I use bsdinstall or do the
>> gpart stuff by hand, everything goes fine until I try to boot the new
>> install when all I get is "Invalid partition table!"  And nothing.
>>
>> Am I going to have to use a legacy MBR and disklabel rather than gpt?
>> Can anyone give me any hints as to what I might look for?  I've googled
>> to no avail (just some stuff from 2010 that doesn't seem to apply).
>>
>> I really want to follow the setup outlined at
>> https://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot .
> Well, I got it going.  In fact, when I got home last night I found that
> it was sitting there running FreeBSD off the disk.  After some
> experimentation, I found that I had left it in legacy boot mode after
> strictly following the instructions in the above web page.  And I think
> I had set the MBR to active, although I can't really remember.
>
> Even with that hack, however, UEFI just plain didn't work.  It didn't
> find the bootable partition; when I tried to get it to look for it it
> claimed "Operating System not found" or something along those lines.  It
> may well be looking for Windows only, I guess.
>
> Fortunately I can live with legacy boot.  I reinstalled that way,
> following a slightly-modified version of the ZFS-root instructions
> above, and I'm installing ports as I write this.
>
> So, notwithstanding the lack of UEFI support, success!

Did you have secure boot enabled?
-Nathan


More information about the freebsd-hackers mailing list