Solved Still unable to set mountpoint / during install (sort of)

E

edwinoakes

Two disk computer. Disk 1 has 4 slices. Slice 1 has FreeBSD 8.2, slice 2 is formatted using newfs with ufs2, slice 3 is an extended partition with ubuntu 12.10, slice 4 is also empty. I attempted to install PC-BSD there. The PC-BSD installation failed with an error saying something about not being able to load grub. The entire second disk contains a FreeBSD 9.1 system. All 4 operating system boot successfully with GAG. Both disks have MBR partitions.

I have tried installing FreeBSD 10.1 in Slice2. I have tried with both the USB stick image and the CD boot only iso. Both give the same problem. When I get to the to the install page where you select the partition , I select "ada1s2a 232GB freebsd-zfs". I would prefer to install in a ufs file system, but I go ahead and select finish and commit anyway. The dialog that come up says That FreeBSD must have a mount point, I have to abort the installation to get out of the partitioning page. I was not given a chance to assign a / mount point. On earlier tries there was a dialog the had what looked like an input box for mount point, but I was unable to get anything into it.

I don't need to change the disk partitions, I just need to select the partition to install into.

There is an earlier thread that mentions this problem, marked as solved. If I understand what that thread suggests is that the disk should be partitioned with MBR. That is how my disk is partitioned.

My FreeBSD 9.1 system is showing problems. The most annoying is that firefox will no longer access the FreeBSD forum. An upgrade attempt on firefox fails with dependency issues. The PC-BSD PBI packages sound like something I would like to try. There are directions on adding the PBI to FreeBSD, so I thought I would try that with a clean install.
 
After many failed tries, I have finally been able to install FreeBSD 10.2 in the second slice of my disk that has 4 slices. I don't remember everything I tried, but the following worked. It is possible that something I did on previous tries also made changes to the slice.

1. I installed FreeBSD 8.3 to that slice, /dev/ada1s2, from an install DVD I already had. Formatted the first 224G as UFS and the rest, about 10G, as swap. this installation was bootable.
2. I tried to install FreeBSD 10.2 from a USB memory stick image over the FreeBSD 8.3 installation. It failed, saying something about not being to overwrite an existing file.
3. I did newfs on /dev/ada1s2a, where I had installed FreeBSD 8.3.
4. I did an install of FreeBSD 10.2 from the memory stick. I was then able to boot it, after setting up GAG to boot the second slice. I installed it with the user option.

In my opinion, the disk section is very buggy. If everything is as the software expects it may work OK, but if it does not do what is intended, there is no viable way to fix things. Expecting you to use a command line like gpart on a disk with several partitions that you don't want corrupted, is a disaster waiting to happen. For the manual or advanced option of handling the installation partition, why not use the somewhat complicated but very usable code used by the FreeBSD 8.3 or earlier installer?

As a separate issue I was able to install the x11/xorg package,and it opens with a default window manager. After installing the www/firefox it would not open with firefox in one of those windows.
 
This can all be avoided by using VMs rather than multibooting. There is no risk of blowing away partitioning, bootcode, or data, and more than one can be run at a time.
 
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