[SOLVED] New Install -- Doesn't boot

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

After much fidling and experimentation, I can now say that when
installing either 12.0-RELEASE or 11.2-RELEASE (and perhaps also
earlier releases), under some circumstances (e.g. if one is doing
"manual" partitioning using GPT) it may perhaps be of some considerable
value to drop down into a shell and execute one or more of the following
shell commands prior to actually performing the install:

gpart destroy -F ada0
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0 bs=1M count=10

where "ada0" would, of course, be replaced by the FreeBSD name for
the specific drive where one is planning to install the new OS.

Anyway, these additional steps seem to have worked for me, and I am
now successfully booting 12.0-RELEASE from the drive in question.

Regards,
rfg


P.S. I am not qualified to comment on why either of the above shell
commands might be either necessary or advisable when doing a fresh
install on a drive which has already had all partitions removed,
e.g. via the Linux gparted tool.