"Invalid partition table" on 10-stable.

[Hans Ottevanger]

On 09/18/14 06:11, Frank Mayhar wrote:
> Someone please give me a hint of what's going on here.  I just got a
> Dell Precision M6800.  It's not doing UEFI, it's all legacy.  I pulled
> the installed drive and dropped in a Seagate hybrid 1T drive, then tried
> (and tried, and tried, and tried) to install 10-stable on it.  I'm using
> a memstick image, btw.
>
> No matter what I try and no matter whether I use bsdinstall or do the
> gpart stuff by hand, everything goes fine until I try to boot the new
> install when all I get is "Invalid partition table!"  And nothing.
>
> Am I going to have to use a legacy MBR and disklabel rather than gpt?
> Can anyone give me any hints as to what I might look for?  I've googled
> to no avail (just some stuff from 2010 that doesn't seem to apply).
>
> I really want to follow the setup outlined at
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot .
>
> Hmm, is there a way to use, say, grub to do the bootstrap?  How would I
> go about doing that?  And most importantly, would it help?
>
> My head is about to explode so I'm turning to you guys.  Even a hint
> would help.  Thanks.
>

Hi,

I have a similar situation with my oldish Q6600 based systems using an 
INTEL DP965LT main-board. After a fresh installation of FreeBSD 10 or 
higher (using a GPT scheme) I consistently get the message:

No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key

when rebooting the new installation for the first time.

In my situation I can get the installation working by booting single 
user from an older FreeBSD install CD (9.2R in my case) and reinstall 
the MBR as follows:

/sbin/gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr ada0

Probably gpart changed the way it installs the MBR, but I think it is 
very board (or maybe BIOS) specific: other systems do not have the issue.

Please let me know if this "trick" helps for you.

Kind regards,

Hans