Installing FreeBSD > 10.4 on a system which can't cope with mixed UEFI/MBR

R

rturja

I have an old Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Xi 2550 laptop running latest bios version (from 2008 IIRC :D ). Couple of days ago I finally found time setting up FreeBSD or derivative on it for primary use as browsing laptop and terminals.

I tried several memstick images, ISO's and whatnot but always got the "No operating system found!" message. I tried some suggestions found around net in converting GPT to MBR without success and thats the question - is there any way of doing that without trashing the install media useless? For "reasons" the only tools available locally then were for Windows, EaseUs Partition Master etc.

I solved this by installing 10.4-RELEASE from archive and then freebsd-updating it to 12.0-RELEASE-p10 in single step, but I would like to know how to get bootable USB's for machines with apparently "broken" BIOS? Any FreeBSD based way of converting would be welcome.

-Reko
 
In complex situations I always install linux and boot freebsd using grub/kfreebsd.
Otherwise configuration of the bios is sometime try and error.
Installation of bootcode and or boot partition can be critical.
Note : Some bios only allow booting from the first disk.
Normally you can boot from a gpt disk if you have first a freebsd-boot partition and installed the bootcode on it.
man gpart
Write MBR:
/sbin/gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr adaX
Add first partition :
/sbin/gpart add -b 40 -s 472 -t freebsd-boot adaX
Write bootcode:
/sbin/gpart bootcode -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 adaX
 
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