While writing an mini-memstick image of the FreeBSD operating system onto a USB, the said USB doesn't boot off of an non-EFI system
I have booted FreeBSD memstick images in both UEFI and CSM (legacy BIOS) modes. Please report back with the specific memstick image and hardware that you tested.
(In reply to Ed Maste from comment #1) I used the "FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img" And my hardware is as follows CPU Intel Pentium 4 630 Prescott 90nm Technology RAM 2.00GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 332MHz (5-5-5-15) Motherboard Hewlett-Packard 09F0h (XU1 PROCESSOR) 58 °C Graphics W1946 (1360x768@60Hz) 1024MB NVIDIA GeForce 210 (ZOTAC International) 43 °C Storage 74GB Western Digital WDC WD800JD-60LSA5 ATA Device (SATA) 33 °C Optical Drives LITE-ON DVD SOHD-16P9S ATA Device Audio Realtek High Definition Audio
Can you try with the most recent 11.2-PRERELEASE image? There have been a few changes to how the images are created, which I believe may resolve this. https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/11.2/FreeBSD-11.2-PRERELEASE-amd64-20180504-r333226-memstick.img
There are two changes in review for this issue: * https://reviews.freebsd.org/D15598 (by imp@) * https://reviews.freebsd.org/D15599 I have a test image built with D15598 and the equivalent of D15599 at https://people.freebsd.org/~emaste/mini-image-2018-05-28-amd64.xz Can you uncompress and write it to a memstick and see if it boots on your hardware?
A commit references this bug: Author: emaste Date: Tue May 29 15:06:13 UTC 2018 New revision: 334337 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/334337 Log: switch amd64 memstick installer images to MBR A good number of BIOSes have trouble booting from GPT in non-UEFI mode. This is commonly reported with Lenovo desktops and laptops (including X220, X230, T430, and E31) and Dell systems. Although UEFI is the preferred amd64 boot method on recent hardware, older hardware does not support UEFI, a user may wish to boot via BIOS/CSM, and some systems that support UEFI fail to boot FreeBSD via UEFI (such as an old AMD FX-6100 that I have). With this change amd64 memsticks remain dual-mode (booting from either UEFI or CSM); the partitioning type is just switched from GPT to MBR. The "vestigial swap partition" in the GPT scheme was added in r265017 to work around some issue with loader's GPT support, so we should not need it when using MBR. There is some concern that future UEFI systems may not boot from MBR, but I am not aware of any today. In any case the likely path forward for our installers is to migrate to CD/USB combo images, and if it becomes necessary introduce a separate memstick specifically for the MBR BIOS/CSM case. PR: 227954 Reviewed by: gjb, imp, tsoome MFC after: 3 days Relnotes: Yes Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D15599 Changes: head/release/amd64/make-memstick.sh
The next -current snapshot builds will include the switch to MBR partitioning. I hope to receive a number of test reports on those (or the test image I built) before MFCing the change to 11 for RC2.
A commit references this bug: Author: gjb Date: Thu May 31 20:01:59 UTC 2018 New revision: 334444 URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/334444 Log: MFC r334310, r334337: r334310 (imp): Teach ufs_module.c about bsd labels and probe 'a' partition. If the check for a UFS partition at offset 0 on the disk fails, check to see if there's a BSD disklabel at block 1 (standard) or at offset 512 (install images assume 512 sector size). If found, probe for UFS on the 'a' partition. This fixes UEFI booting images from a BSD labeled MBR slice when the 'a' partiton isn't at offset 0. This is a stop-gap fix since we plan on removing boot1.efi in FreeBSD 12. We can't easily do that for 11.2, however, hence the short MFC window. r334337 (emaste): switch amd64 memstick installer images to MBR A good number of BIOSes have trouble booting from GPT in non-UEFI mode. With this change amd64 memsticks remain dual-mode (booting from either UEFI or CSM); the partitioning type is just switched from GPT to MBR. PR: 227954 Note, there are two changes specific to stable/11 where there is code that had diverged from head and never merged back. The two changes are an include in stand/efi/boot1/ufs_module.c, replacing sys/disk/bsd.h with sys/disklabel.h and replacing BSD_MAGIC with DISKMAGIC in the same file. The latter two are direct commits to stable/11 in order to avoid unexpected regressions at this point of the 11.2 cycle. Thank you to imp@ for pointing out what changes needed to be made. Approved by: re (marius) Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation Changes: _U stable/11/ stable/11/release/amd64/make-memstick.sh stable/11/stand/efi/boot1/boot_module.h stable/11/stand/efi/boot1/ufs_module.c
jollyjester, can you please try one of the recent snapshot images on your machine and check that this is fixed?
(In reply to commit-hook from comment #5) This commit breaks UEFI specification and the memstick will/does not boot on most if not all UEFI-only machines (Tested on Asus E203NA). https://superuser.com/questions/563074/do-hard-drives-need-a-guid-partition-table-gpt-to-boot-in-uefi-mode The hybrid ISO image dd'd to USB flash works fine. Handbook should probably mention that the ISO can be used with USB flash.