Hello all,
I've spent the last week trying to sort this one out, and I finally decided to defer to the forums for help. I have a Dell XPS 13 with a BIOS that only understands MBR. My SSD is a 4k aligned SSD. I am attempting to have a ZFS root partition with a dedicated swap partition, as recommended. Here are the commands that I have been using to set up the MBR and the slices.
From there, I've used multiple combinations of a single ZFS, a boot UFS, etc. My current setup was done by
I've tried boot0, just a ZFS boot using the method described on the wiki (writing the first 512 bytes of zfsboot to the slice, then the rest after a seek=1024), all kinds of things.
(I should mention I've done the gnop hack to get ZFS to align properly.)
So here's the problem:
Inside the install disk, everything is peachy. I can see the ada0 MBR, the slice, and everything inside it. When I boot INTO the system, ada0 has no geometry. Which is bizarre, because the system boots just fine. But it can't find the swap partition, right now it can't even find the boot partition (I have to load every module I need before booting into it). I can MAKE the system running see the partitions by recreating the MBR with gpart, and then - exactly - recreating thefreebsd FreeBSD slice, and presto everything shows up just fine. But on each and every boot up the geometry vanishes. I've tried using fdisk, disklabel, gpart, doing the cylinder math, I cannot get it to detect the partitions IF the drive is MBR formatted. For giggles, I MBR formatted a USB stick, moved boot over there, GPT partitioned the SSD, and all the GPT partitions were detected.
So the long and short of it:
I can create a slice, proper partitions, successfully install, and (somewhat) successfully boot. However, in the new system, all the geometry I hand typed is not detected. Which means swap doesn't load, right now the UFS boot partition doesn't auto load..
I'm stumped. Any ideas?
I just want an MBR basedfreebsd FreeBSD system that boots from ZFS and has a dedicated swap and is 4k aligned. I'm slowly starting to lose hair. :\
I've been through handbooks, wiki's, and a few other websites (I was playing with GELI for a bit), and more than a few Google searches. But I have no issues reading through documentation if anyone has suggestions.
I've spent the last week trying to sort this one out, and I finally decided to defer to the forums for help. I have a Dell XPS 13 with a BIOS that only understands MBR. My SSD is a 4k aligned SSD. I am attempting to have a ZFS root partition with a dedicated swap partition, as recommended. Here are the commands that I have been using to set up the MBR and the slices.
Code:
# gpart create -s mbr ada0
# gpart add -t freebsd -b 2048 -a 4k ada0
# gpart create -s bsd ada0s1
From there, I've used multiple combinations of a single ZFS, a boot UFS, etc. My current setup was done by
Code:
# gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -s 1G ada0s1
# gpart add -t freebsd-swap -a 4k ada0s1
# gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -a 4k ada0s1
# gpart bootcode -b /boot/mbr ada0
# gpart bootcode -b /boot/boot ada0s1
# gpart set -a active -i 1 ada0
I've tried boot0, just a ZFS boot using the method described on the wiki (writing the first 512 bytes of zfsboot to the slice, then the rest after a seek=1024), all kinds of things.
(I should mention I've done the gnop hack to get ZFS to align properly.)
So here's the problem:
Inside the install disk, everything is peachy. I can see the ada0 MBR, the slice, and everything inside it. When I boot INTO the system, ada0 has no geometry. Which is bizarre, because the system boots just fine. But it can't find the swap partition, right now it can't even find the boot partition (I have to load every module I need before booting into it). I can MAKE the system running see the partitions by recreating the MBR with gpart, and then - exactly - recreating the
So the long and short of it:
I can create a slice, proper partitions, successfully install, and (somewhat) successfully boot. However, in the new system, all the geometry I hand typed is not detected. Which means swap doesn't load, right now the UFS boot partition doesn't auto load..
I'm stumped. Any ideas?
I just want an MBR based
I've been through handbooks, wiki's, and a few other websites (I was playing with GELI for a bit), and more than a few Google searches. But I have no issues reading through documentation if anyone has suggestions.