Dell Latitude Notebook won't boot

P

Patrick Bär

Hi all,

Today I received my new notebook with Windows 8 pre-installed. At least I think it was some Windows. I started installing via DVD and all went fine, but since then it refuses to boot off the hard drive. I tried various things, wiping with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<drive> and installing ZFS, but nothing helped. Always the same "no bootable device found".

Very bad: Tried to boot my old SDD with a running FreeBSD installation on it, again no bootable device found...

If somebody helped me about this, I'd be very thankful ;)
 
Next step: I could successfully boot the ZFS-install, but then it stops because it can't mount the root-partition (hangs in mountroot). I thought that this might have fixed things, installed with UFS and.... no boot anymore.
 
Found the solution to my problem, please rate if I missed something or not?

The Dell notebook only supports legacy boot and NO GPT. Since FreeBSD ships with GPT as a default, it obviously could not work. If you set the initial partitioning to MBR instead of GPT, you run across various errors, like a stupid "invalid parameter" message. Simple reason: While older FreeBSDs made a straight-forward "first partition, then label" approach, the new one throws it together. Hence you first have to create a "partition" freebsd without a mount-point and then a "partition" inside with a mountpoint and a valid labels "freebsd-ufs" and so on. Everything with the same menus, so this is really confusing.
 
The most likely answer is that the Dell has a BIOS that sees GPT and assumes it can only exist with UEFI. These can sometimes be fixed with BIOS updates.

GPT disks boot fine as MBR. A GPT has a PMBR for compatibility that looks and works like a normal MBR.
 
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