Tried to install 14.3R onto the metal (no upgrade), but the install doesn't seem to have worked

MMacD

MMacD

Upgrade has never worked for me, so I just purge the disc contents and reinstall absolutely.

I tried that with 14.3R and everything seemed to go okay; the installer didn't complain about anything.

But the system doesn't boot. The boot loader complains that there's nothing to boot from. It will boot from the install dvd, but not from the hard disc on which I think I installed 14.3R. I had disconnected all the other drives apart from the cdrom, a swappable drive cradle, and the 1TB WD mechanical target drive before running the install, so it's not that it's confused about which drive to look at.

I've no clue what might be going on
 
Check that your first partition is EFI, must be fromated as FAT32, GUID C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B, and you need to have there:
Code: 
/EFI/Boot/ 
/EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi
bootx64.efi is the same file as loader.efi, just renamed when copied there.
 
vmisev said:
Check that your first partition is EFI, must be fromated as FAT32, GUID C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B, and you need to have there:
Code: 
/EFI/Boot/
/EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi
bootx64.efi is the same file as loader.efi, just renamed when copied there.
Click to expand...

Is EFI boot required by 14.3R? I normally avoid it because my motherboards tend to be old enough not to have provision for "real" EFI in the ROM BIOS
 
I get that problem on an old PC. I avoid it by entering the UEFI BIOS Boot options menu, and installing from the DVD drive entry that is prefixed by "UEFI :" (though not because I want the FreeBSD EFI boot menu - I prefer the simple ASCII art version of the logo actually).
 
MMacD said:
Is EFI boot required by 14.3R? I normally avoid it because my motherboards tend to be old enough not to have provision for "real" EFI in the ROM BIOS
Click to expand...
Sorry, I didn't do legacy BIOS in a long, long time, so can't help much there. Just to make it easier for others to answer, what is partitioning scheme, MBR or GPT; and which FS you have UFS of ZFS?
 
Hey vermaden I remember seeing your post somewhere, some time ago, where you solved quite similar problem, but for the life of me I can't remember where...
 
FWIW, I installed 14.3R from scratch on an X220 which has uefi bios a week or so ago, and everything went smoothly... so it does work (sometimes :)). Upgrade from 14.2 to 14.3 also worked fine on another box, literally zero problems. I used UFS in both cases, not ZFS. I can't be arsed with ZFS on a laptop, it's not a storage system.
 
For a start - all FreeBSD installations I do are Auto (ZFS) with BIOS+UEFI setup.

This way - you are covered in all possible ways.

Could you try to install FreeBSD again this way?
 
As usual, I did a default install (my experience has been that default choices usually get the most QA effort) using the "guided UFS" choice, tho since I wanted to use only half the disc I had to fight with the installer since it tried to consume the whole disc despite my picking "partition" and M(odify) to choose 464GB for the UFS partition. But eventually it accepted it, and I had these parts defined
  • P1 512K freebsd-boot
  • P2 464G freebsd-ufs /
  • P3 4G freebsd-swap
and the other half of the disc left raw for later Win 11 installation.

I presume I got MBR, tho I don't recall the installer ever saying anything about it. The motherboard is a Supermicro A1SRM-2758F bought used after I broke its predecessor (-2558F, bought new).

Running gpart list on the boot partition, I found no mention of MBR, but a definite mention of EFI. My diagnosis at the moment is that the installer is somewhat broken since it seems not ever to have told the secondary loader how to mount the boot drive, which probably explains why the loader didn't think there was anything to boot from.

I'll purge the current contents again and try to install an EFI boot if I can figure out how without having to use a ZFS boot.

Many thanks to all for the help so far!
 
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