More bsdinstall issues

[ikbendeman]

I'm not going to state all of the obvious that the community has about the switch to the BSD install installer.

However, is anyone else having the same issues as I am? I have to use a suggested partition layout or bootloader can't find my kernel. This is true both for ZFS and UFS, GPT and MBR, so I guess I'm stuck with one huge root partition. Ridiculous. Any advice from anyone (besides installing 8.x, compiling sources, and upgrading that route)? Please help. This installation program is extremely frustrating.

 

[wblock@]

More specifics would help. We can't tell what hardware you are using or the install steps taken.

 

[kpa]

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/bsdinstall-partitioning.html

I just tried this using the FreeBSD-9.2-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso CD-image under VirtualBox. I was able to create a booting system by following the manual partitioning instructions of the handbook and the "Example 2.3. Creating Traditional Split Filesystem Partitions" part (minus a separate partition for /tmp but that does not matter). Otherwise I used the default options for everything.

 

[SirDice]

If you came from Linux it's common to create a separate partition for /boot/, don't do that on FreeBSD.

 

[ikbendeman]

I didn't create a boot partition for FreeBSD except for the 64k freebsd-boot thing on GPT.
Partitions created:

/
/var
/tmp
/usr/
/usr/home
swap

And it simply wouldn't boot. Even when I installed boot0 manually, it would get stuck at boot1 or boot2, not sure which (I still get them confused).

I finally got it to boot using GPT defaults (root and swap; sucks)

I'll probably try to do a 10.0 ZFS install on my other drive but ZFS seems so... memory hungry. Then again I have a 4 GHz 8 core FX with 16 GB of RAM at 1866 MHz, so zfs shouldn't slow it down too much. Is it possible to dual boot root ZFS with Windows 7 per chance (I have a weakness for Fallout)?

 

[wblock@]

The partition layout is not likely to stop the system from booting. http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?p=149210&postcount=13 shows creating a custom MBR layout with bsdinstall(8).

If you have not changed that disk, please boot the install CD into Shell mode and show the output of gpart show. Or use mfsBSD.

 

[ikbendeman]

Again, I recognize the partitioning scheme is not the issue. It worked with 8.0 maybe ill I'll back up all my packages and do ZFS root. When I tried that though I got an error about mismatched cylinder something or other when running gpart create -s 64K -t freebsd-boot ada0.

I miss the installer we had on 8.0. Will bsdinstall soon support ZFS root install without manual intervention?

 

[wblock@]

Will bsdinstall soon support zfs root install without manual intervention?

Yes.