Hi, I am trying to boot FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE i386 memstick on a HP D530 USDT, and I am unable to boot FreeBSD 10.2. When I try to boot from the USB, the BIOS skips it and attempts to boot over the network (there is no OS on my D530's HDD). 10.1-RELEASE i386 boots. If I try to boot the same USB on a home-built PC with a ASUS H87M-E motherboard, the BIOS also skips the USB, and goes to the HDD (w/ FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE). But If I try to boot the USB on a Dell Inspiron B130, I am able to boot successfully. If I try more recent Dell hardware (Inspiron 13 7352 w/ UEFI Secure Boot disabled), I am able to boot from the USB, but the kernel gets stuck on some ACPI error (only on i386, amd64 will boot, but I am talking about the issue on the HP D530 USDT). If I look at the partition table on the FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE i386 memstick image, I find out that the partitions are now in GPT, and I believe this is what is causing the issues. Is there a solution/workaround? Could you please fix this bug? Thanks, Neel Chauhan === https://www.neelc.org/
As an FYI, FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE amd64 memstick does not boot on the ASUS H87M-E in BIOS mode, but boots in UEFI mode. And the joke: Was this an attempt paid for by optical drive manufacturers to get us back to using CDs and DVDs? If it was, why didn't they just do it with Windows 10 instead of FreeBSD 10.2?
I figured out why FreeBSD wasn't booting (I figured this out a few months ago): FreeBSD changed their installation media to GPT format. The problem is probably that HP's and Asus' BIOS/UEFI don't boot from GPT disks in BIOS mode, but Dell's UEFI does. On the HP, I can use a USB floppy disk loaded with PLoP Boot Manager, and the plug in my FreeBSD USB stick in after PLoP booted, and then select the USB device. On the Asus, I can boot in UEFI mode successfully.
(In reply to Neel Chauhan from comment #2) Also, I forgot that FreeBSD i386 doesn't have UEFI support. But at this point, amd64 is more useful for new hardware.