On Fri, 5 Jul 2013, James E. Pace wrote:
I bought an HP Pavilion p7-1597c [1] system last week. It is Intel Core
i5-3330, with a Seagate 1.5 TB SATA drive and 12 GB of memory, shipped with
Windows 8.
I have disabled Secure Boot and enabled Legacy device booting.
That says the disk is GPT partitioned for UEFI.
I am able to complete the install of FreeBSD 9.1/amd64 from the CD without
any problems. However, when I attempt to boot, it doesn't.
Originally I was trying to dual boot with Win 8, but eventually I rendered
Win8 unbootable. So, now I have given FreeBSD the whole disk. I have done
the standard install. I found instructions to have the install use MBR
(instead of GPT), but that also doesn't work.
In what way?
After an install, I get to the boot0 (the F1 boot menu thing) screen, but
when it tries to boot, it prints "#" and doesn't boot. When trying to
share the disk with Windows, mostly I'd get boot errors about not having a
bootable device (ERROR: No boot disk has been detected or the disk has
failed.).
boot0 is the multi-boot loader. I'm reasonably sure it will not work on
a GPT disk. GPT needs the PMBR loader. This should be correctable by
using the Shell option of the install disk:
# gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 ada0
The installer would write that by default on a blank disk. I don't know
what it does when partitions are added to a GPT disk. For that matter,
I'm not sure how you got boot0 on there.
In the BIOS setting, I've tried both IDE and AHCI in "Storage Options ->
SATA emulation".
AHCI is preferred and will go a little bit faster, but either will work.
PC-BSD 9.1 has the same results. It installs fine, but resets after
selecting something at the boot0 prompt.
boot0 strikes again. AFAIK, the only option for multi-boot on GPT disks
is EasyBCD or grub (untested). But really, a VM is far preferable to
multi-boot for many situations.
FreeBSD 8.4 wouldn't install because the installer didn't have device node
for /dev/ad4s1b in /dev in order to create the filesystems.
That sounds familiar, but I can't find notes on solving it. I would
recommend 9.x anyway.
If there is nothing on the disk to lose, I would start from scratch by
going to the shell from the installer:
# gpart destroy -F ada0
Return to the installer, and it should find the entire disk
unpartitioned.
If you really want to multi-boot, reinstall Windows 8. Leave part of
the disk unpartitioned for FreeBSD. Install EasyBCD in Windows
(https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/) and install FreeBSD in a new GPT
partition, and maybe it will be easy. I have not tried a multi-boot
install with Windows 8 or GPT/EFI, so can't really say what it will
take. If you do that, take notes and post them somewhere.
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