Lenovo T420 installlation with zfsroot and GPT/UEFI (FreeBSD 10.1)

[Niklaas Baudet von Gersdorff]

Bigby James [2015-04-22 08:10 -0500] :

> First off, as of 10.1-RELEASE FreeBSD cannot boot from a ZFS root
> partition via UEFI. It's simply not possible right now.

I assume this is what the warning message is about, isn't it?

> Second, my T520 will only boot FreeBSD from a GPT disk via UEFI, and
> the T420 likely has the same firmware. So you can format an MBR disk
> with ZFS and boot via legacy mode, but ZFS can't boot from GPT with
> UEFI.

Which would be realised by setting "Partition Scheme" from "GPT" to
"MBR" in the installation guide for a ZFS setup, wouldn't it? If I do so
and change the boot mode to "legacy" I only get a blank screen with the
cursor blinking in the top left.

What I did then was dd-ing the non-uefi memstick on a flash disk,
ensuring that "legacy" is the active boot mode, and booting from the
flash disk. I went through the installation, choosing the guided ZFS
install again. There I set "MBR" as partition type (to make sure that
everything is "old-style") and performed the installation. After that I
rebooted and what happens now is that the system tries to boot, shows a
blank screen, tries to boot again, shows a blank screen again, and so
on.

> Or you can do what I did, and create a 1.5G partition for the root
> ('/') filesystem, format it to UFS, and leave the rest of the disk for
> ZFS.

Thanks for pointing out that option. I'd like to keep the partition
scheme as simple as possible -- if it can be simple.

Thanks for your help,

-- 

    Niklaas