[Bug 282184] Installer fails to create bootable system

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=282184

John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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             Status|New                         |Open
           Assignee|bugs@FreeBSD.org            |jhb@FreeBSD.org
                 CC|                            |jhb@FreeBSD.org

--- Comment #1 from John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> ---
MBR booting requires a couple of steps.  First, there is the boot loader in the
first sector (MBR) of your disk.  It sounds like the installer did not change
that but left it alone since you are still able to boot other OS's? 
Traditionally with the conventional MBR boot loader, you need to use a tool to
change which partition is "active" which is how you switch OS's.

The second stage is that the first sector from the partition is loaded into
memory and executed and this is not an MBR boot loader.  In FreeBSD this is
effectively "boot1", but is installed kind of carefully as the first 16 sectors
of the partition are used, with sector 0 containing boot1, sector 1 containing
the BSD partition table, and sectors 2-15 containing boot2 (more or less).

I'm not quite sure what your dd commands are doing as you are just reading the
first sector of the partition?  It's also not clear to me at what stage this is
failing for you?  Are you using a custom MBR boot loader to deal with choosing
which OS you boot?  Are you relying on the active flag and using a tool to
change the active flag?  Do you know if the boot process got far enough to try
to load from the FreeBSD partition?

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