FreeBSD 9.0 - GPT boot problems?

Kevin Oberman kob6558 at gmail.com
Sat Aug 4 05:58:54 UTC 2012


On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 3:09 PM, Torfinn Ingolfsen
<torfinn.ingolfsen at getmail.no> wrote:
> Just a short update on this machine (Acer Aspire X1470) and the GPT / UEFI situation.
>
> Today I set up another partition, EFI system partition. The partyitions now looks like this:
> root at kg-vm2# gpart show ada0
> =>       34  250069613  ada0  GPT  (119G)
>          34        128     1  freebsd-boot  (64k)
>         162  119537664     2  freebsd-ufs  (57G)
>   119537826    8388608     3  freebsd-swap  (4.0G)
>   127926434  121634816     4  freebsd-ufs  (58G)
>   249561250     204800     5  efi  (100M)
>   249766050     303597        - free -  (148M)
>
> I formatted the partition like this:
> root at kg-vm2# newfs_msdos -F32 /dev/ada0p5
> newfs_msdos: trim 50 sectors to adjust to a multiple of 63
> /dev/ada0p5: 204512 sectors in 12782 FAT32 clusters (8192 bytes/cluster)
> BytesPerSec=512 SecPerClust=16 ResSectors=32 FATs=2 Media=0xf0 SecPerTrack=63 Heads=16 HiddenSecs=0 HugeSectors=204750 FATsecs=100 RootCluster=2 FSInfo=1 Backup=2
>
> I have tried putting an EFI shell on it (I got the idea from this[1] page, I have tried both the 1.0 and 2.0 x64 shell), like this:
> root at kg-vm2# mount -t msdosfs /dev/ada0p5 /mnt
> root at kg-vm2# ls -l /mnt
> total 848
> drwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    8192 Aug  3 14:30 EFI
> drwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    8192 Aug  3 16:21 boot
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  847232 Aug  3 14:56 shellx64.efi
> root at kg-vm2# ls -l /mnt/boot
> total 760
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  771072 Aug  3 16:23 bootx64.efi
> root at kg-vm2# ls -l /mnt/EFI
> total 16
> drwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  8192 Aug  3 14:30 FreeBSD
> drwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  8192 Aug  3 15:06 boot
> root at kg-vm2# ls -l /mnt/EFI/boot
> total 760
> -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  771072 Aug  3 15:29 bootx64.efi
>
> but no dice - it is not working, it still prints "ERROR: No boot disk has been detected or the disk has failed."
> when I try to boot from this disk.
> How do I figure out where this UEFI firmware that Acer has put in this machine is getting it's boot manager and or boot loader from?
> I tried running 'strings -f' on the BIOS file (sorry, UEFI firmware), that got me all the EFI error messages, but nothing useful.
> Googling didn't help either.
>
> References:
> 1) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface

It's not clear from your message, but did you use the gpart bootcode
command to write the protective MBR and the gptboot code as documented
in the gpart(8) man page?
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
E-mail: kob6558 at gmail.com


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