9.1-RC2 - could it be that the installer does not write the MBR?

[Glen Barber]

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 02:06:03AM +0200, Rainer Duffner wrote:
> Am Fri, 19 Oct 2012 17:11:30 -0400
> schrieb Glen Barber <gjb at FreeBSD.org>:
> 
> > On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 10:38:41PM +0200, Rainer Duffner wrote:
> > > If I select the "entire disk" for FreeBSD, I think it's a reasonable
> > > assumption that the MBR should replaced, too.
> > > Please don't make people install FreeBSD 9.0 first on disks with
> > > non-FreeBSD MRRs and then upgrade to 9.1.
> > > 
> > 
> > Can you outline for me in detail what you did when you partitioned
> > your drive during the installation?
> 
> I chose "entire disk", then deleted all partitions-suggestions except
> the first one and created my own partitioning scheme.
> (/, swap, var, usr, maybe /var/log and /home, too)
>  

Ok, this is similar to my case.

> > I have seen your specific issue exactly once, and reliably reproducing
> > the problem has not been successful so far.
> > 
> > BTW, what was on the drive before you did the install, if anything?
> 
> It had a version of Solaris. Maybe Opensolaris. I don't know exactly.
> And I don't know if it had zfsroot or not. I created a HW-RAID1 with
> the HP P400 controller on it.
> The drives were previously used in another server.
> 

Ok, as long as they were not new drives.  Thank you.

> I tried to install 9.1RC2 twice on these disks and it always went back
> to the grub-prompt after reboot.
> Then I installed 9.0 and it's running now.
> 

The grub prompt for (Open)Solaris?  Or do you use grub on FreeBSD?

I _think_ at this point, you've hit the same problem I hit, the only
difference is that in my case, 9.1-PRERELEASE was installed twice,
because the paritions were not ideal.

So, my guess is if you were to boot the install cd and select 'Live CD'
or 'Shell' from the first menu option, and wrote the GPT bootcode to
da0p1 (assuming da0 is the drive) and reboot, it would have booted fine.

In my case, the disk originally had an older FreeBSD install, so had an
existing MBR.  The odd thing though is that the system was bootable
before the second installation.

Glen

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