Installing FreeBSD 9.1 amd64 on IBM x3550 M3

[Panagiotis Christias]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 09:54:25AM +0200, John Alex. wrote:
> 
> On 02/12/2013 02:59 AM, kpneal at pobox.com wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 11:43:55AM -0800, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> >> On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 9:58 AM, Panagiotis Christias
> >> <p.christias at noc.ntua.gr> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> I suppose trying an 8.3 installation would be the easiest way to use MBR
> >>> instead of GPT, right;
> >>
> >> That would do it, but 9.1 is perfectly happy doing MBR. It's just not
> >> the default.
> >>
> >> Seems like many BIOSes assume that GPT=uEFI. Clearly this is silly, but...
> >>
> >> I know Lenovo laptops have this problem and it is VERY annoying. I run
> >> FreeBSD on a GPT disk on my ThinkPad, but I have booteasy installed on
> >> an MBR disk (which contains W7) and my BIOS is set to boot from that
> >> disk.BootEasy then will boot up the GPT disk with FreeBSD.
> >
> > Doesn't GPT start with an MBR covering the entire disk? How feasible would
> > it be to tweak that MBR so that a boot partition was listed in it? Say, a
> > partition holding the root filesystem could be listed in both the GPT and
> > MBR style. Then a disk could be booted with MBR or GPT at the whim of the
> > firmware.
> >
> > I agree that this BIOS=MBR/UEFI=GPT assumption is pure rubbish. I've got
> > machines with this documented restriction and I'd love a way around it.
> >
> 
> It is feasible, it's known as a hybrid MBR. On Linux I've accomplished 
> this using the gdisk utility, I don't know how it can be done on FreeBSD 
> though. I had to use this ugly solution in order to install windows 8 on 
> a GPT disk on a pc without UEFI support.

Just for the record, I managed to install successfully 8.3 with the
default options and 9.1 by selecting MBR instead of GPT during the
initial disk patitioning. In both cases the system's UEFI/BIOS options
were left untouched.

Thanks for the help,
Panagiotis

-- 
Panagiotis J. Christias    Network Management Center
P.Christias at noc.ntua.gr    National Technical Univ. of Athens, GREECE