Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2012 13:24:59 -0600 From: markham breitbach <markham_breitbach@ssimicro.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: gpart and mbr give "no operating system" message at boot. Message-ID: <504A4A0B.10908@ssimicro.com>
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I am trying to partition a disk to be used as the primary boot disk for a FreeBSD 8.3 installation using gpart to install an MBR partition. The system is an existing FreeBSD 5.2.1 system at a remote location (ie impossible to boot from CD/netboot/etc), but has no data of value. To do this I am copying /boot and mfsroot.gz from an mfsbsd iso image to boot to an MFS live system so I can wipe the drive and do a clean install of 8.3. After booting to the MFS I do this: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad2 bs=1m count=1 gpart create -s mbr ad2 gpart add -b63 -t freebsd ad2 gpart create -s bsd ad2s1 gpart add -i1 -s 1g -t freebsd-ufs ad2s1 gpart add -i2 -s 1g -t freebsd-swap ad2s1 gpart add -i4 -s 2g -t freebsd-ufs ad2s1 gpart add -i5 -s 1g -t freebsd-ufs ad2s1 gpart add -i6 -t freebsd-ufs ad2s1 gpart set -a active -i 1 ad2 gpart bootcode -b /boot/mbr ad2 newfs /dev/ad2s1a newfs -U /dev/ad2s1d newfs -U /dev/ad2s1e newfs -U /dev/ad2s1f followed by a sysinstall and some configuration. When I reboot I get a message that says "Operating system not found" and the system hangs. If I follow the same procedure but create a gpt partition it works swimmingly. I am OK with using a gpt partition if needed, but for the sake of curiosity I would like to know why I can't make the MBR partition partition work. Am I missing something?
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