Bill Tillman wrote:
Today I encountered a problem which has me stumped. I downloaded and
burned the ISO image for 9.0-RELEASE for amd64. I installed an older
IDE hard drive to test the new OS with and did the install. I was very
surprised at the (1) the dvd is actually a live CD if you wanted it to be
and (2) the installers screens have all been revamped. I can't say for sure
if the partitioning part was where it went south on me because I was
attempting to setup some additional partitions but the input screens had
me confused and I pressed Auto so it took off and made the default
paritions. The computer would
start up, show me the flash screen to do the Bios setup and then nothing.
I put the other drive back in and it worked fine. I tried another computer
and the results were the same.
snip
This is a known problem with bsdinstall in 9.0. Newer pc's have bios
that use gpart format disk partition layouts (IE windows7) so for
FreeBSD to be compatible with new PC hardware, Bsdinstall defaults to
using the gpart format disk partition layouts. Bsdinstall provides no
automatic way to create (mbr, Dos) format partitions. The user is
suppose to know before installing 9.0 that their pc hardware requires
(mbr, Dos) format partitions and instead of using the automatic gpart
format disk partition layouts they must select the manual option which
opens a shell where the installer must enter the native commands to
create the (mbr, Dos) format partitions like sysinstall did in 8.2 and
older releases. This puts a unfair burden on users to know beforehand
whether their pc bios are gpart aware. Bsdinstall provides no displayed
information informing the user of what they need to know about their
equipment before selecting the disk format to use.
I believe this user is just the tip of the iceberg of users installing
9.0 on older hardware. At this time the only way to automate the
creation of the (mbr, Dos) format partitions using the 9.0 bsdinstall is
to select the manual option in the disk config screen and them launch
"sade", this is the disk configuration dialog from sysinstall that has
been turned into a standalone utility.
If you think "sade" should be made a option of the bsdinstall disk
config dialog then post your comments here and cc to
nwhiteh...@freebsd.org the author of bsdinstall.
The bsdinstall has absolutely no built in HELP, But there is some new
documentation in the online freebsd manual.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bsdinstall.html
It's under constant revision so it may not be totally accurate, but it
will provide you some insight to your disk config problems.
Note: before you can use that gpart disk to create mbr you have to
delete the (crap) gpart writes at the end of the physical disk. This
script works great to do that.
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html
After running the script, then on same disk pc install 8.2 and reboot.
If it boots fine then you know for sure your pc bios is not gpart aware,
and you will always have to use mbr disk format on that pc hardware
combination. The SADE utility will become your long time friend.
Good luck.
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