Is it possible to install FreeBSD on a single MBR slice with ZFS ?

[Manish Jain]

>>AFAIK, the FreeBSD 11.0 installer wants the whole disk <<

Hi David,

That appears to be my impression too : it simply is not possible to install FreeBSD on an MBR disk
(unless one is willing to use the entire disk).

That is a fairly serious inconvenience : I hate the idea of having to use GPT on my disk because I cannot use the Boot Easy manager (boot0cfg) under GPT. Plus GPT inevitably leads to reckless partitioning.

For disks under and upto 2 TB, MBR is supremely better.

I did manage to get ZFS though, courtesy a spare slice available on my disk.

I installed FreeBSD using UFS on ada0s2 and migrated the setup to a ZFS tank under ada0s3 using the rsync strategy
brilliantly detailed at :

https://imil.net/blog/2016/04/28/Migrate-FreeBSD-root-on-UFS-to-ZFS/

But following the migration, I have made a serious error. I used Windows (ada0s1) to delete ada0s2 :
Windows has rearranged the MBR table to make ada0s3 -> ada0s2. I am now struggling to fix the MBR table.
If you have any tips, that shall be wonderful

Thanks for replying
Manish Jain