Efi/mbr freebsd-11.0-RELEASE-p9 unbootable

[Manish Jain]

>> 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

I strongly recommend to everyone facing problems [or if you have no wish 
to face them in future] :

1) Use Legacy BIOS; not UEFI
2) Use MBR partitioning; not GPT. This further implies that either use 
the whole disk (presuming you have only one), or use UFS only (no ZFS)
3) Only install from optical media; not USB stick.

If you have any problems booting FreeBSD, use the installer to set up a 
Fixit/Live Shell session and make sure you put Boot Easy to the MBR :

boot0cfg -B /dev/ada0 # or whatever device corresponds to your disk

One of the best things in FreeBSD is Boot Easy : it makes life so much 
sweeter that once you start using it, you will realize that Grub has no 
place in the FreeBSD world - except for any Linux installation later 
which should put Grub boot record to its system partition, never the MBR.

For any assistance, please at least send across your gpart geometry, 
which you can get in Fixit/Live Shell with :

gpart show ada0

Regards
Manish Jain