Re: Looking for some guidance

On Sun, Jun 25, 2023 at 5:00 PM Holger Sebert <holger.sebert@mailbox.org>
wrote:

> On 6/25/23 19:55, Patrick Mahan wrote:
> > I run my own domain which lost its main server (hardware issue) about
> two weeks ago right as I was leaving for a two week family vacation.  While
> I was gone, I ordered a new HP Pavilion Desktop TP01-3055xt as a
> replacement and bought from FreeBSD Mall the 13.2 AMD64 DVD.
> >
> > The Pavilion is running UEFI, but oddly it wasn't recognizing the DVD as
> a boot media until I went into the boot menu at startup and
> specifically selected the DVD drive.  I also noticed that there was also
> the "Windows Boot Manager" listed which it seemed UEFI was default.
> >
> > The Pavilion came with a 500G SSD and a 2T HD.  It seems that Windows OS
> has been installed on the SSD leaving the HD as available storage.  I have
> also installed the system disk from the old server (1T HD) but it was
> formatted for the old bios (no UEFI boot partitions).
> >
> > After I booted up the FreeBSD DVD and entered shell mode I see (using
> gpart show) that
> > nvd0 (SSD) shows the following partitions:
> >      efi (260M)
> > ms-reserved (16M)
> > ms-basic-data (476G)
> > ms-recovery (5.3M)
> >
> > The ada0 drive is my old system disk with the following partitions:
> >     freebsd-ufs (/) (50G)
> >     swap (16G)
> >     freebsd-ufs (/var) (100G)
> >     freebsd-ufs (/tmp) (100G)
> >     freebsd-ufs (/usr) (200G)
> >     freebsd-ufs (/home) (465G)
> >
> > The ada1 drive is the 2TB with the following partitions:
> >      ms-basic-data (1.8T)
> >
> > So my questions are -
> >
> > 1) What the heck is this "Windows Boot Manager" and can I use it or must
> I destroy it?
> > 2) Do I need to add the loader.efi to the efi directory on nvd0?
> > 3) Can I mount nvd0?  What mount type (FAT32?) do I use?
> >
> > That should get me over my first hump.  My current plan is to install to
> the 2T hard drive and use the old system disk as a reference point to
> retrieve my DNS/Mail/Firewall stuff.
> >
> > Thanks for any help,
> >
> > Patrick
>
> Sounds like you have pre-installed Windows on your new Pavillion
> machine. Do you need/want it?
>
> If no, then I would suggest simply wiping all that cruft and go
> with the FreeBSD's installer defaults (either UFS of ZFS).
>
>
I got it installed on the 2T hard drive and left the SSD alone.  Once I had
a drive with a GPT for UEFI, it now shows up in the UEFI boot menu as a
bootable device.  I've since shuffled the order of what boot device to
query first, moving the windows boot manager to the bottom of the list. It
now boots without intervention by me into FreeBSD.  Now I have to get all
my services back up.  I've gotten DNS up and NTP is working.  I'm currently
installing all of my packages I need to function (bash, emacs, python,
dovecot, postfix, etc).  So we shall see how it goes.

Thanks,

Patrick