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Date: Fri, 29 May 2015 09:46:18 -0600 (MDT)
From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>
To: David Newman <dnewman@networktest.com>
cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Missing boot loader (was: Re: creating a virtual clone)
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On Fri, 29 May 2015, David Newman wrote:

> On 4/6/15 9:28 PM, Olivier Nicole wrote:
>
>> My solution is http://www.cs.ait.ac.th/~on/technotes/archives/2015/01/30/how-to_clone_a_freebsd_virtual_machine_on_vmware/index.html
>> certainly not the best/fastest, but it works.
>
> Thanks for this. After following the clone instructions, restore appears
> to work, but the system comes up with a "Missing boot loader" error.
>
> This is perhaps because the next-to-last step from the live CD is:
>
> cd /
> mount -o rw /dev/da0p1 /mnt
> gpart bootcode -b /mnt/boot/pmbr -p /mnt/boot/gptboot -i 1 da0
>
> And that returns "/dev/da0p1: Operation not permitted" even though da0p1
> is the target system's root/boot partition.

In this code, da0 is the source disk, where the bootcode files are read. 
It is mounted on /mnt.  So there are two reasons that gpart cannot write 
bootcode to da0p1.  First, it is mounted, and second, it is filesystem 
partition, not a freebsd-boot partition.

The target disk cannot be da0p1.  Maybe it is a simple typo, and 
either the second or third line was meant to be ada0 rather than da0.