Efi/mbr freebsd-11.0-RELEASE-p9 unbootable

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2017 07:51:55 +0000, Manish Jain wrote:
> I strongly recommend to everyone facing problems [or if you have no wish 
> to face them in future] :
> 
> 1) Use Legacy BIOS; not UEFI

Not every platform allows this, primarily due to being "certified"
by MICROS~1. Maybe in the future, UEFI will be the only available
system, and it will be locked down to actively prevent booting
anything that "doesn't fit"...



> 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)

GPT shouldn't be a problem when you use FreeBSD only. In case you
want to multi-boot, using GPT tends to introduce more trouble and
work(arounds).

Allow me to repeat pointing at the following summary of how to
properly initialize disks:

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html

You will also find suggestions on how to deal with UEFI booting
on that page.



> 3) Only install from optical media; not USB stick.

Problematic for modern devices with no optical media reader. And
sometimes, booting from USB DVD drives also doesn't work as intended.



> 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

Only if you want to boot more than one OS. :-)

Sidenote: If you want to only use FreeBSD, you can also use the
dedicated disk layout (no GPT or MBR at all). Keep in mind this
is the "traditional" way of partitioning a disk, whose concepts
were introduced before the PC era. Interoperability with Linux
or "Windows" is definitely out of scope here. ;-)



> 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.

Yes, this is important to remember.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...