On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 09:54:25AM +0200, John Alex. wrote: > > On 02/12/2013 02:59 AM, kpn...@pobox.com wrote: > > On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 11:43:55AM -0800, Kevin Oberman wrote: > >> On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 9:58 AM, Panagiotis Christias > >> <p.christ...@noc.ntua.gr> wrote: > >>> > >>> I suppose trying an 8.3 installation would be the easiest way to use MBR > >>> instead of GPT, right; > >> > >> That would do it, but 9.1 is perfectly happy doing MBR. It's just not > >> the default. > >> > >> Seems like many BIOSes assume that GPT=uEFI. Clearly this is silly, but... > >> > >> I know Lenovo laptops have this problem and it is VERY annoying. I run > >> FreeBSD on a GPT disk on my ThinkPad, but I have booteasy installed on > >> an MBR disk (which contains W7) and my BIOS is set to boot from that > >> disk.BootEasy then will boot up the GPT disk with FreeBSD. > > > > Doesn't GPT start with an MBR covering the entire disk? How feasible would > > it be to tweak that MBR so that a boot partition was listed in it? Say, a > > partition holding the root filesystem could be listed in both the GPT and > > MBR style. Then a disk could be booted with MBR or GPT at the whim of the > > firmware. > > > > I agree that this BIOS=MBR/UEFI=GPT assumption is pure rubbish. I've got > > machines with this documented restriction and I'd love a way around it. > > > > It is feasible, it's known as a hybrid MBR. On Linux I've accomplished > this using the gdisk utility, I don't know how it can be done on FreeBSD > though. I had to use this ugly solution in order to install windows 8 on > a GPT disk on a pc without UEFI support.
Just for the record, I managed to install successfully 8.3 with the default options and 9.1 by selecting MBR instead of GPT during the initial disk patitioning. In both cases the system's UEFI/BIOS options were left untouched. Thanks for the help, Panagiotis -- Panagiotis J. Christias Network Management Center p.christ...@noc.ntua.gr National Technical Univ. of Athens, GREECE _______________________________________________ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
