BIOS Boot on FreeBSD 14.0 bootonly.iso?

T

taiwan740

Is this still supported or is it EFI boot only from now on?

Back in 13.2 I ran a utility called isomacprog (https://github.com/anathonous/isomacprog) to alter the FreeBSD iso's to force the CD to boot from bios boot because my 15 year old Apple hardware has trouble with EFI boot using the amd64 version, and it would only work if you forced the machine into legacy BIOS boot emulation mode (or that's what I understand, at least)

Is there another way to obtain FreeBSD media that boots in BIOS mode and not EFI?

Note: I could be way off, I make no intent to impression that I have any kind of intelligence or knowledge on this.

If it helps for any kind of context, install74.iso from OpenBSD boots fine on these particular machines. FreeBSD-14.0-amd64-bootonly.iso (unaltered) does not boot.
 
taiwan740 said:
Is this still supported or is it EFI boot only from now on?
Click to expand...
It should be bootable both ways. But apparently there's some hardware out there that really doesn't like the way it's set up.

I would suggest using the memstick image, not the ISOs, to burn to a memory stick. Unless you can't boot from a USB drive?
 
SirDice said:
It should be bootable both ways. But apparently there's some hardware out there that really doesn't like the way it's set up.

I would suggest using the memstick image, not the ISOs, to burn to a memory stick. Unless you can't boot from a USB drive?
Click to expand...
Can't boot from USB!

I'll try it again sometime this week, both the isomacprog method and the memstick.img, maybe I've balls'd up somewhere. - certainly the isomacprog method worked ok on the 13.2 release. I even wrote a how-to guide on how to do it on these particular tragic hardware disasters.
 
Does the 13.x ISO boot for you? It's a bit of chore but you could do a quick install of that and immediately upgrade it (freebsd-update(8)) before doing anything else. Not ideal but it will get you there.
 
iMac 5,1 (2006)

No USB booting. Optical drive does support DVD-Rs but horrific grinding noise as they are too thick so CD-Rs only.

FreeBSD 12.4 bootonly.iso (unchanged) - won't boot
FreeBSD 13.2 bootonly.iso (unchanged) - won't boot
FreeBSD 13.2 bootonly.iso (isomacprog) - won't boot
FreeBSD 14.0 bootonly.iso (unchanged) - won't boot
FreeBSD 14.0 bootonly.iso (isomacprog) - won't boot
OpenBSD 7.4 (unchanged) - boots

My initial reaction was that this machine is a pile of garbage, but I'm happy enough with it being an OpenBSD machine. Especially for the $15 I paid for it, and considering the brand new Apple machine I have that was quite a bit more expensive will only run macOS... never mind ☺️
 
Did some more investigation. Would appear for these particular tricky devices the One True Solution is to take the hard disk out (replace with SATA SSD while you're at it...), install the operating system in MBR/BIOS boot mode on another machine, and then reinstall the disk to the desired device.
 
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