freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 847, Issue 5

[Walter Parker]

>
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2020 19:52:02 -0700
> From: Kevin Oberman <rkoberman at gmail.com>
> To: questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: UEFI dual boot
> Message-ID:
>         <CAN6yY1trVp2Sj2b1XDx1bzL9DDpY+Ap1rns9Dt4e9A6k+gzMCg at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> I just received a new laptop, the first to only support UEFI. I have shrunk
> the Windows partition and used bsdinstall from the memstick to install
> FreeBSD 12.1. The partitioning went fine, except that there are now to efi
> partitions, the one previously on the drive for Windows 10 and the one the
> install created.
>
> I now need to learn the magic of configuring boot. I have looked at the
> wiki tutorial and the efibootmgr(8) man pae, but I am missing something
> basic.
>
> Should I have two efi partitions? If so, how does the system figure out
> which to use? Into which does the efi loader go?
>
> This is further complicated by not having been able to get the network up,
> so I can't upload my configuration. (This is an unrelated issue as I can't
> get W10 to connect to my network, either.)
>
> Anyway, pointers to useful documentation or a cluebat would be appreciated.
> --
> Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
> E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com
> PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683
>
>

A clueball: you only need one EFI partition on a system.
The FreeBSD UEFI data goes in a subdirectory on the UEFI partition
(which is DOS FAT partition). IIRC the directory should be named
something like FreeBSD.
To boot FreeBSD, you would tell the UEFI firmware to add FreeBSD to
the boot list by selecting the FreeBSD directory on the EFI partition.

Another solution would be to use someline Refind to setup a multiboot
loader rather than using Multiple firmware entries.

A quick Google search shows a gist that talks about this at
https://gist.github.com/zeising/5d2402d92b4cf421c7402d663b2d9e41#file-gistfile1-txt

That link documents how to setup and configure at the UEFI level.


Walter


-- 
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men
of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.   -- Justice Louis D.
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