GPT boot blocks, booting and booteasy

[Kevin Oberman]

2011/8/15 Andrey V. Elsukov <ae at freebsd.org>:
> On 10.08.2011 07:12, Kevin Oberman wrote:
>> I have /boot/pmbr loaded into the PMBR and gptboot into the
>> freebsd-boot partition. I'll
>> admit that I did this by rote and don't understand how these two files
>> interact with the
>> UEFI BIOS to get the loader started. I'm not really certain that I
>> even need both.
>>
>> Is it possible to build a "custom" booteasy boot system with boot0cfg
>> or some other tool
>> so I can select d ifferent bootable partition or my other disk which
>> is sliced in the traditional
>> fashion? Can anyone point me to any information on how the boot
>> process works with GPT?
>
> PMBR is a simple variant of MBR which does know enough to parse GPT
> partition table and how to load bootcode from the "freebsd-boot"
> partition. Then gptboot does search bootable UFS partition.
> At this time we do not have any  bootcodes like booteasy for GPT.
> But you can try to use bootme and bootonce GPT attributes (see
> gpart(8)). Also you can use grub boot loader.

Andrey,

Thanks for the response. The 'bootme' and 'bootonce' attributes look to solve
some issues. Looks like I might need to have a bios-boot partition to use grub,
but I may give it a shot. On the whole, the advantages of GPT are such that I
would love to see FreeBSD move to make it the standard partitioning scheme,
though I understand this will not be easy until/unless Windows develops full
GPT support.

Just having more than 4 partitions as opposed to having to sub-partition a real
partition (slice) is very nice.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer - Retired
E-mail: kob6558 at gmail.com