The saga continues

[William A. Mahaffey III]

On 10/06/15 14:33, Polytropon wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Oct 2015 08:25:06 -0453.75, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
>> When I went to reboot, the UEFI 'BIOS' reported
>> 'missing MBR record' & hung there.
> Do you have "MBR legacy boot" enabled or forced? When using GPT
> volumes, one of them has to be a "boot partition". Here you can
> find a good illustration of the steps involved:
>
> http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html#_the_new_standard_gpt
>
> By the way, it's more like either "BIOS" _or_ "UEFI". ;-)

Hence my quotes, it is definitely UEFI, I just call it a BIOS out of old 
habits :-/ ....

>
>
>> There were/are *no* explicit options
>> to boot from a USB drive, although that worked during the install w/
>> virgin HDD's, it came up w/ a very DOS-y screen which listed 'FreeBSD'
>> as a boot option.
> That depends on the boot order specified in the UEFI. When
> a "higher priority" media was found bootable, no other media
> will be tried. Check in the UEFI setup if you can change the
> boot order, for example to "USB, optical, HDD".

*No* options for ordering in this implementation, however, I did 
eventually find that hitting 'F9' during boot brought up a little dialog 
which *did* include the USB drive as an option. I hit that & was off & 
running .... into my next set of issues :-/ .... stay tuned ....

>
> When the disks are empty, a boot attempt won't work, so the
> UEFI decides to look at other possible boot sources, such as
> USB sticks or optical media. This step will not be taken when
> the HDD is "first priority" and is bootable.
>
>
>
>> Is there
>> some magic combo of key-strokes to get it to try to boot from the USB
>> stick anyway ?
> Depends. If I remember correctly, PF12 during POST (or what it
> is called like in UEFI) will show a screen to select the boot
> source. Of course - only if the UEFI manufacturer has implemented
> this interactive selection.

F9 in my case ....

>
>
>> I want to boot into a shell & zap the 1st 1 GB or so of
>> each drive & try again, a procedure I had to use early this summer
>> during a NetBSD install, which *did* work AOK & allowed me to complete a
>> successful install.
> A few kB usually are enough - just kill the partition table and
> the boot loader, located at the beginning of the disk. It will
> then appear as "empty". :-)


Actually my setup-script 'gpart destroy -F's ada[0,1] as its 1st step 
before slicing up the drives, so I am back in bidness .... Thanks :-) ....


-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
	 ever devised by man."
                            -- Gen. George S. Patton Jr.