partitioning dilemma

[Aragon Gouveia]

Thank you for all your replies.  I recompiled with EBR_COMPAT disabled 
and began creating EBR partitions, but then realised how much of a 
headache it'll be to calculate the partition offsets that fall on my 
SSD's erase boundary.  It's normally easy with MBR, but the one sector 
EBR header throws my calculations out. :)

I decided to give GPT a try...


On 05/05/11 06:21, Andrey V. Elsukov wrote:
> Currently we do not have boot manager for GPT similar to boot0 which we use for MBR.
> So it may be not so easy to select what you want to boot from GPT. Probably bootme/bootonce
> attributes could help, but i did not try them.

I think the bootme/bootonce attributes will suffice. :)


> I do not think that it is bad idea, it should work.

Are you able to boot such partitions?  Over here my system is just 
entering a boot loop.  BIOS has UEFI disabled, and I know for certain 
the pmbr code is being executed, but not sure if it gets as far as 
chaining to gptboot code.

Here's what I have:

# gpart show ada2
=>       34  468862061  ada2  GPT  (223G)
          34     524254     1  efi  (256M)
      524288        128     2  freebsd-boot  (64k)
      524416     524160        - free -  (256M)
     1048576   67108864     3  freebsd  [bootme]  (32G)
    68157440   67108864     4  freebsd  (32G)
   135266304   67108864     5  freebsd-swap  (32G)
   202375168   33554432     6  freebsd-zfs  (16G)
   235929600  201326592     7  freebsd-zfs  (96G)
   437256192   31605903        - free -  (15G)

# gpart show ada2s3
=>       0  67108864  ada2s3  BSD  (32G)
          0      2048          - free -  (1.0M)
       2048   2097152       1  freebsd-ufs  (1.0G)
    2099200   8388608       2  freebsd-ufs  (4.0G)
   10487808  33554432       4  freebsd-ufs  (16G)
   44042240  23066624          - free -  (11G)


GPT and BSD schemes have /boot/pmbr and /boot/boot bootcode 
respectively.  GPT partcode applied to partition 2 from /boot/gptboot.


Thanks,
Aragon