NEVERMIND!
It took me awhile, but I think I've finally got the hang of this gpart/GPT
stuff... well... mostly anyway (but see below).
I understand now that /boot/mbr is a "regular" sort of MBR, with regular
sort of MBR bootstrap code, whereas /boot/pbmr is the ``protected'' MBR
record that says, in effect "I am not a normal MBR. I am special and
I'm here to tell you that this drive actually uses the GPT scheme."
I've also figured out that despite the gpart(8) man page's unfortunate
use of the word "or", it is evidently the case that when doing "gpart
bootcode ..." it is perfectly OK to use all three of the -b, -p, and -i
options together, and that doing so has (I think) the equivalent effect
to invoking "gpart bootcode ..." once with only the -b option and then
once again with only the -p and -i options together.
I think that I have only two final questions:
1) I can't remember now if the ``guided'' partitioning approach that
is offered to folks who are installing FreeBSD 9.x itself offers a
"GPT" option or not. Does it? (If not, and if MBR is really now
considered antiquated, then I would think that the install process
really should offer a GPT option, if it isn't doing so already.)
2) Not knowing any better, on this fresh install that I'm doing now
(of 9.1-RC3) when it got down to the point where it asked me how I wanted
to partition, I selected the "exit to shell" option. Once I got a
shell prompt, I proceeded to do bascially everything that's suggested
in the "The New Standard Method" section of Warren's nice tutorial.
My assumption was that I could do this, get all of my shiny new GPT
partitions just the way I wanted them, and just simply exit the shell...
an action which, I had hoped, would return me to the install process
at a point where I would then be asked to assign mount points to each
of my newly created GPT partitions, and then, hopefully, the rest of the
install process would proceed in an entirely customary way.
Sadly, this did not happen. After exiting from the shell, the install
process _did_ resume, however the first thing it did was to check the
integrity of the distributions (kernel+base) that I had selected earlier,
and once it was satisfied that they were OK, it immediately started to
try to extract everything from those two distribution files.
It is easy to undeerstand why this last step failed virtually immediately
with the error message:
Error while extracting base.txz:
Can't set user=0/group=0 for
.Can't update time for .
Obviously (and quite reasonably) the install process did not have any
clear idea of where exactly it was supposed to be extracting the files
to, because I had not even assigned mount points for any of my brand new
GPT partitions yet.
So, um, I'm wondering... Is this a bug, or a feature of the current
FreeBSD install process? Should I be filing a PR on this?
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A footnote: Since my first try at installing using a GPT partitioning
scheme crashed and burned (as described above), I naturally hit the
reset button on the machine in question and just started over from
the beginning of the whole install process, hoping that I would (this
time) be able to make use of the various GPT partitions that I had
already set up. (See above.)
After the obligatory preliminary questions, I finally I came to the place
in the process where it wanted to know if I wanted to do guided, manual, or
shell partitioning. At this point, I figured that it made little difference
which one I choose (because I'd already created the partitions, and even
newfs'd them all) and now I only needed to assign mount points. So I
selected the easy choice... "guided"... and immediately I got an error
message that said there is not enough free space on the drive to install
FreeBSD. (Grrrrr!) Oh well! Along with that error message, I was given
an option to open the partition editor, so I took that option and then
just assigned proper mount points to all of the partitions that I'd already
created, and then, finally, I clicked on <Finish>.
>From there, everything went fine and I successfully installed a minimal
9.1-RC3 system, and then successfully booted it.
But then I started to wonder if maybe Warren had left out the instructions
for performing this final critical step (assigning mount points) in his
tutorial, so I went back and looked at it to see if he had mentioned it,
and I see that it doesn't say a word about mount points.
Warren? Was this a deliberate or inadvertant ommission? Is the subject
of mount points outside of the scope of what you had been intending to
cover in your tutorial?
And how exactly do mount points get associated with partitions (in particular
GPT partitions) anyway? Are these just another partition attribute? The
gpart(8) man page is also utterly silent on the subject of mount points,
even though they are quite obviously a rather critical component of what
it takes to make a partition useful on/to FreeBSD.
P.S. Assigning mount points appears to be one thing that the new swiss-
army-knife of gpart _cannot_ do. Given that, I have to ask...
What if any command line tool is available to associate partitions with
mount points?
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