branch 9 and uefi

[Thomas Mueller]

from Zoran Kolic <zkolic at sbb.rs>:

> It took me by surprise. The mobo I have on my mind for
> new desktop has uefi instead of bios. It is asus m5a97,
> with 970 chipset, well priced among users on the net.
> How would it behave with 9.1? After all reading, I plan
> to boot it as memory stick and go with simple "guided"
> install. Someone could comment on the topic?
> At the moment, I see I have to avoid manual partition
> and mbr. Or not?
> If it sounds bad, any other option for motherboard and
> amd 8120 cpu?

Gót András <andrej at antiszoc.hu> responded:

> I had a hard time booting FreeBSD 8.2 on an IBM X3550M3 which is also
> an UEFI maniac one. I could only boot FreeBSD from an USB DVD and
> install it from there. Maybe some legacy fallback boot options are
> availabe for this mobo. I think they have its user manual on their
> website.

I installed FreeBSD last summer (2011) on a UEFI system, beginning with 9.0-BETA1 after having big problems with NetBSD.

My hard drive is Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB, practically forcing me to use GPT as opposed to MBR.

I was able to boot, and remain able to boot using System Rescue CD (sysresccd.org) and selecting the Super Grub Disk from menus.

Then I can boot as described in /usr/ports/sysutils/grub2 , which is where I got that information.

You don't say how big your hard drive is, and if you want to run any OS besides FreeBSD.

You can go into the guided installer to see what it wants to do but are better off selecting partition sizes outside the guided installer.

bsdinstall's boot partition is useful if you run FreeBSD as the only OS on the hard disk, as I have done successfully installing FreeBSD to a USB stick.

I was able to boot the FreeBSD installer USB stick using the memstick image, and am able to boot the USB-stick FreeBSD installations I've created.

Tom