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Date:      Fri, 19 Sep 2014 04:49:44 -0700
From:      Frank Mayhar <fmayhar@gmail.com>
To:        freebsd-hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: "Invalid partition table" on 10-stable.  Solved.  Ish.
Message-ID:  <1411127384.92654.9.camel@jill.exit.com>
In-Reply-To: <1411013471.25791.52.camel@jill.exit.com>
References:  <1411013471.25791.52.camel@jill.exit.com>

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On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 21:11 -0700, Frank Mayhar wrote:
> Someone please give me a hint of what's going on here.  I just got a
> Dell Precision M6800.  It's not doing UEFI, it's all legacy.  I pulled
> the installed drive and dropped in a Seagate hybrid 1T drive, then tried
> (and tried, and tried, and tried) to install 10-stable on it.  I'm using
> a memstick image, btw.
> 
> No matter what I try and no matter whether I use bsdinstall or do the
> gpart stuff by hand, everything goes fine until I try to boot the new
> install when all I get is "Invalid partition table!"  And nothing.
> 
> Am I going to have to use a legacy MBR and disklabel rather than gpt?
> Can anyone give me any hints as to what I might look for?  I've googled
> to no avail (just some stuff from 2010 that doesn't seem to apply).
> 
> I really want to follow the setup outlined at
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot .

Well, I got it going.  In fact, when I got home last night I found that
it was sitting there running FreeBSD off the disk.  After some
experimentation, I found that I had left it in legacy boot mode after
strictly following the instructions in the above web page.  And I think
I had set the MBR to active, although I can't really remember.

Even with that hack, however, UEFI just plain didn't work.  It didn't
find the bootable partition; when I tried to get it to look for it it
claimed "Operating System not found" or something along those lines.  It
may well be looking for Windows only, I guess.

Fortunately I can live with legacy boot.  I reinstalled that way,
following a slightly-modified version of the ZFS-root instructions
above, and I'm installing ports as I write this.

So, notwithstanding the lack of UEFI support, success!
-- 
Frank Mayhar
frank@exit.com




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