How to restore FreeBSD boot manager on GPT disk ?
Ian Smith
smithi at nimnet.asn.au
Tue Nov 8 12:52:50 UTC 2016
In freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 649, Issue 3, Message: 3
On Tue, 8 Nov 2016 10:49:23 +0000 Manish Jain <bourne.identity at hotmail.com> wrote:
> One thing I have loved about FreeBSD over the years is the superbly
> designed Boot Easy boot manager. If any other OS overwrites the MBR, it
> is straightforward to restore with 'boot0cfg -B /dev/ada0'
>
> That command only works on MBR disks though, as far as I know. Is there
> any equivalent command on a GPT disk ?
Sadly, no. Noone has written a GPT equivalent of boot0cfg; perhaps it's
too hard, or developers perceive no use for multi-booting; I don't know.
Often people will suggest using the GPL'd GRUB; I suppose that works ok
with GPT disks these days. You could research rather more complicated
Boot Environments, about which I know nothing, but I don't think these
enable a choice between e.g. BSD/s|Linux/s|Window/s systems as boot0cfg
does. [ Corrections to any misperceptions are welcome! ]
Jack L. offered:
gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 ada0
which restores the PMBR and GPT bootblocks to ada0p1, but that's not
(yet?) able to provide or restore multi-boot options as such.
Are you forced to use GPT, because of UEFI-only motherboards?
cheers, Ian
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