FreeBSD 9.0 - GPT boot problems?

[Thomas Mueller]

> 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

The gpart bootcode command is quite apart from and unrelated to (as far as I can tell) the EFI partition.

I think the EFI partition is supposed to be the first partition on a GPT-partitioned disk.

I have installed FreeBSD to a USB stick, GPT-partitioned with three partitions: boot, root and swap.

I used gpart bootcode command to make the USB stick bootable, there was no EFI partition in this case.

This is good if FreeBSD is the only OS installed to a disk.

EFI partition is to allow sharing a hard drive with multiple OS installations.

Tom