Missing boot loader

[David Newman]

On 5/29/15 8:46 AM, Warren Block wrote:
> On Fri, 29 May 2015, David Newman wrote:
> 
>> On 4/6/15 9:28 PM, Olivier Nicole wrote:
>>
>>> My solution is
>>> http://www.cs.ait.ac.th/~on/technotes/archives/2015/01/30/how-to_clone_a_freebsd_virtual_machine_on_vmware/index.html
>>>
>>> certainly not the best/fastest, but it works.
>>
>> Thanks for this. After following the clone instructions, restore appears
>> to work, but the system comes up with a "Missing boot loader" error.
>>
>> This is perhaps because the next-to-last step from the live CD is:
>>
>> cd /
>> mount -o rw /dev/da0p1 /mnt
>> gpart bootcode -b /mnt/boot/pmbr -p /mnt/boot/gptboot -i 1 da0
>>
>> And that returns "/dev/da0p1: Operation not permitted" even though da0p1
>> is the target system's root/boot partition.
> 
> In this code, da0 is the source disk, where the bootcode files are read.
> It is mounted on /mnt.  So there are two reasons that gpart cannot write
> bootcode to da0p1.  First, it is mounted, and second, it is filesystem
> partition, not a freebsd-boot partition.
> 
> The target disk cannot be da0p1.  Maybe it is a simple typo, and either
> the second or third line was meant to be ada0 rather than da0.

Thanks for your email. Backstory: This VM is a dump/restore clone of
another machine that has no separate boot partition. Here's /etc/fstab
from the source machine:

/dev/ada0p2	/		ufs	rw	1	1
/dev/ada0p3	none		swap	sw	0	0

And on the new target VM:

/dev/da0p1	/		ufs	rw	1	1
/dev/da0p2	none		swap	sw	0	0

I don't understand the bit about 'ada0', since 'gpart list' shows only
da0 and two providers under it.

The source machine has boot files in its root partition, under /boot.
How can I get that working here?

Thanks!

dn