Efi/mbr freebsd-11.0-RELEASE-p9 unbootable

Wed Apr 19 06:12:48 UTC 2017

18.4.2017 20.17, Antonio Olivares kirjoitti:
> On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 11:45 PM, Heikki Lindholm
> <holindho at saunalahti.fi>  wrote:
>> On 14.04.2017 05:38, Antonio Olivares wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear freebsd users,
>>>
>>> I got a used toshiba-laptop with windows 7.  A friend of mine gave me a
>>> new
>>> hard drive and we installed void-linux with a 1GB /boot partition, an 8 GB
>>> swap partitionx and a 100GB / for the install.  Installation suceeded, but
>>> grub install failed some ttx? Error.  I then got a regular x86_64 amd
>>> freebsd 11.0 RELEASE and installed it sucessfully as well.  I did not get
>>> questioned to install bootloader. When booting the machine tries to boot
>>> off the network.  I get a supergrubdisk and boot off it and I am able to
>>> run freebsd-update on it get it to -p9 and install pkgs that I want to
>>> run.  I am not very fond of secure boot and I had installed linux on
>>> another machine with windows 7 and it supposedly had EFI support, however
>>> when grub installed, i lost the ability to boot into windows.  In this
>>> machine a toshiba satellite laptop, I tried to play it safe and instead
>>> cannot boot either void-linux or freebsd from the hard drive.  I can boot
>>> into freebsd with supergrubdisk, i don't believe it is a question of EFI
>>> because I had previously installed DragonflyBSD 4.8 which has support for
>>> EFI and I selected it as well, but the system was unbootable as well.  How
>>> should I troubleshoot this?  I can boot from live media, but I cannot
>>> install grub or the freebsd bootloader.  Hard drive is 465 GB, with the
>>> above mentioned linux partitions, the rest for freebsd with ufs.  If there
>>> is a how to, or a laptop wiki on this topic, I appreciate all your help
>>> even if it would be recommended that I reinstall the OS again from
>>> scratch.  I am confused with GPT vs old style MBR which just worked TM by
>>> the way and this secure boot crap which renders our machines unbootable.
>>
>>
>> Show the output of gpart show ada0 (or whatever your disk is) for better
>> guesswork to begin. You might need to (1) disable secure boot, (2) enable
>> bios emulation, (3) install FreeBSD (and linux) with the BIOS/MBR booter
>> instead of EFI.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Heikki Lindholm
>>
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>
> Before taking out a hammer and nuking everything, I will show what
> output of gpart:
>
> root at toshiba-f104:~ # gpart show ada0
> =>        34  976773101  ada0  GPT  (466G)
>           34       2014        - free -  (1.0M)
>         2048    2097152     1  linux-data  (1.0G)
>      2099200   16777216     2  linux-swap  (8.0G)
>     18876416  209715200     3  linux-data  (100G)
>    228591616       1024     4  freebsd-boot  (512K)
>    228592640  740293624     5  freebsd-ufs  (353G)
>    968886264    7886870     6  freebsd-swap  (3.8G)
>    976773134          1        - free -  (512B)
>
> root at toshiba-f104:~ #
>
> I use SUPER GRUB DISK to boot.  I check the linux-data and it should
> be linux /boot which is ext2 partition, just that grub failed to
> install.  If I try stuff out and it does not work, then I will just
> give it back to my friend.   I check the bios, I cannot find the
> secure boot option to disable it :(  Any pointers and suggestions
> before I take out the hammer or give up and give it back to my friend.
>
> Laptop is a SATELLITE L775-S7135 which should be supported.

Assuming the laptop actually has EFI, and the EFI implementation is the 
same architecture as the machine, that is, 64-bit if the machine is 64-bit.

I would try creating a dedicated EFI partition for GRUB (and any other 
EFI bootloader). It could be something like 256 MB and likely needs to 
be a FAT filesystem so that EFI can read it. The partition type should 
be EFI system partition (ESP) [1]. Maybe shave off a bit from your swap 
partitions to make room for it.

Then boot using the super grub disk and do more or less the following in 
Linux:
# remove bios versopm of grub if present. In debian:
$ dpkg --purge grub-pc grub-pc-bin
# mount the EFI partition
$ mkdir /boot/efi
$ mount /dev/sdXX /boot/efi
# install EFI grub
$ apt-get install grub-efi
# install grub efi into the efi partition
$ grub-install --target=x86_64-efi /dev/sdXX

After that you should have something like:
$ ls /boot/efi/EFI/debian/
grub.efi
grubix64.efi

Might be different directories depending on your distro (your distro 
probably has an EFI related wiki page). Then you can check whether this 
was enough to bring up grub. If not, you can try playing with efibootmgr 
command in Linux, although you need to be booted into Linux through EFI 
then. You can check that from /sys/firmware. It has an entry for EFI if 
the kernel booted using EFI.

Then the rest is just configuring grub.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_system_partition

Regards,
Heikki Lindholm