I have read quite a lot of disturbing discusions regarding the tendency of GPT not making nice with the BIOS firmware interface, present in all older IBM PC-compatible personal computers. Additional reading has revealed that GPT forms a part of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) standard which is Intel's proposed replacement for the PC BIOS.
Various contributors including Rod Smith's article, Booting from GPT, is a very well written piece, but his comments and suggestions regarding FreeBSD are with regard to v7.2. (There are some differences between v7+ and v8.2)
I have whipped this horse for at least four man-weeks and I simply cannot pursuade FreeBSD v8.2 configured with gpart(8), etc. to create a bootable disk partitation. My latest attempt results with these messages and repeated in dmesg when booting from the IDE drive:
Note that amrd0p1 naming convention is the result of the kernel utilizing the module (device amr) supporting the AMI MegaRAID controller interfaced to the SCSI subsystem. This is a card-based RAID controller and is configured for RAID1.
Regardless, the mirror(s) are partitioned for /(root), /var, /tmp, /usr and all can be mounted and apparently are very accessable. The mysterious thing is that at one time, I had a configuration that would boot from the SCSI mirror; I even physically removed the IDE drive from the platform. I thought I had a good understanding of what to do, so I decided to redo the configuration to increase the swap file size to 6GB. (This is a fresh install.) Unfortunately, after the partition reconfiguration, I cannot boot the system from the GPT boot partition.
I'm at a total impass. How significant is the message, gpt/gpboot: partition 1 not ending on a track boundary? . . .and if this is (part of) the problem, then how would one fix it?
Various contributors including Rod Smith's article, Booting from GPT, is a very well written piece, but his comments and suggestions regarding FreeBSD are with regard to v7.2. (There are some differences between v7+ and v8.2)
I have whipped this horse for at least four man-weeks and I simply cannot pursuade FreeBSD v8.2 configured with gpart(8), etc. to create a bootable disk partitation. My latest attempt results with these messages and repeated in dmesg when booting from the IDE drive:
Code:
# gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 amrd0p1
GEOM: gpt/gpboot: partition 1 does not end on a track boundary.
GEOM: gptid/13282f1e-3aa7-11e1-82ac-000c764e7bd5: partition 1 does not end on a track boundary.
bootcode written to amrd0p1
Note that amrd0p1 naming convention is the result of the kernel utilizing the module (device amr) supporting the AMI MegaRAID controller interfaced to the SCSI subsystem. This is a card-based RAID controller and is configured for RAID1.
Regardless, the mirror(s) are partitioned for /(root), /var, /tmp, /usr and all can be mounted and apparently are very accessable. The mysterious thing is that at one time, I had a configuration that would boot from the SCSI mirror; I even physically removed the IDE drive from the platform. I thought I had a good understanding of what to do, so I decided to redo the configuration to increase the swap file size to 6GB. (This is a fresh install.) Unfortunately, after the partition reconfiguration, I cannot boot the system from the GPT boot partition.
I'm at a total impass. How significant is the message, gpt/gpboot: partition 1 not ending on a track boundary? . . .and if this is (part of) the problem, then how would one fix it?