Incomplete installation of 12.1-R on an Asus laptop

[salvatorembartolotta at libero.it]

> Il 12 maggio 2020 alle 0.17 Per Hedeland <per at hedeland.org> ha scritto:
> 
> On 2020-05-11 20:02, Salvatore Bartolotta via freebsd-questions wrote:> Good afternoon (in the U.S.A.),
> > I installed 12.1-R on an Asus laptop - well, almost. The partition editor, apparently, didn't see the 260MB EFI partition and wanted to create a _second_ EFI partition, in the middle of the disk,right before the rootfs (monted on /), what made little sense to me. I said "no", making the system, for the time being, unbootable. The installation completed except for that step.
> I noticed that too, and did the same, but it didn't result in anunbootable system since I had the EFI partition already set up from anearlier install (which I don't recall wanting to create an EFIpartition, but I may be wrong about that)...
> > nvd0 GPT layout:nvd0p1 260 MB EFI partitionnvd0p2 16MB M$ reserved partitionnvd0p3 256GB M$ system and data partitionnvd0p4 512KB freebsd-bootnvd0p5 2GB rootfs, mounted on /)nvd0p6 80 GB swap (on a 32GB RAM system, maybe overkill)nvd0p7 26GB varfs, mounted on /varnvd0p8 14GB tmpfs, mounted on /tmp, may be ovewrkill as wellnvd0p9 134GB usrfs, mounted on /usr....nvd0lastpartition 650MB M$ Recovery partition
> > I hope there is some simple way to complete this FreeBSD installation, by adding the appropriate booting code to the _existing_ EFI partition.
> It seems you also have a Windows installation - do you want to be ableto dual-boot? Otherwise I think you can find the info you need in theuefi(8) man page. AFAIR it pretty much amounts to "somehow"mount_msdosfs-mounting the EFI partition and copying /boot/boot1.efifrom the FreeBSD installation to /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI(case-independent I believe, I actually have /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi).Should be doable from either of the  or  (if present)choices in the installer.
> --Per Hedeland


Good night,

I'd like to be able to dual-boot for the time being - multi-boot, at the end of the day.  The live CD is certainly my friend, I am just not sure how I am supposed to do it. Should I install some UEFI shell/utility/... in the EFI nvd0p1 partition in order to manage the FreeBSD and Windows booting code, then install/point to the actual FreeBSD (and Windows) booting code (not /boot/boot1.efi, I suppose) ? Has anybody done anything like that?

In the past, I had used some pay$$ware on BIOS (not EFI) machines, sure, but I'd like to be able to do everything - except for the necessary evil, the M$ Windows OS and some of its $program$ - open-source minded.

Thanks for any help, pointer, suggestion.