Other How to mount the boot partitions?

Hi!

I want to create full backups of remote computers. I managed to backup the full zroot now, but in order to recover from a complete crash, more seems to be needed.
There are 3 partitions on each computer:
Code:
# gpart show
=>       40  468862048  ada0  GPT  (224G)
         40     409600     1  efi  (200M)
     409640       1024     2  freebsd-boot  (512K)
     410664        984        - free -  (492K)
     411648  468449280     3  freebsd-zfs  (223G)
  468860928       1160        - free -  (580K)
But when I backup zroot, I am still missing the partitions 1 and 2. I tried to mount them to find out whats on them, but that didn't work:
Code:
# mount /dev/ada0p1 /mnt
mount: /dev/ada0p1: No such file or directory
Why can't I mount that partition? And can I backup them?
 
The freebsd-boot partition doesn't have a filesystem, so there's nothing to mount there. It contains the contents of gptzfsboot(8). See gpart(8) on how to write it. The efi partition is a FAT32 filesystem, you'll need to use mount_msdosfs(8). Its contents are written by simply dd(1)'ing the /boot/boot1.efifat image, see efi(8) for more information.
 
So its basically static content and I can just dump a copy of both partitions to a stick and then copy it from there to every broken box? i.e. it doesn't contain box-specific configurations?
 
it doesn't contain box-specific configurations?
Correct. No box-specific configs. There may be differences between FreeBSD versions though. So copying between same versions will work.
Specific user config files all reside in /boot/loader.conf and /etc/rc.conf

That is the nice thing compared to Windows. You can generally pull the disk out of one UEFI machine and put it in another UEFI box.
No registry. Everything is found dynamically on boot up.
The only thing you need to adjust is the network driver setting in /etc/rc.conf.
For a desktop machine you may need to adjust the video card settings.
 
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