"Invalid partition table" on 10-stable. Solved. Ish.

[Frank Mayhar]

On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 21:11 -0700, 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 .

Well, I got it going.  In fact, when I got home last night I found that
it was sitting there running FreeBSD off the disk.  After some
experimentation, I found that I had left it in legacy boot mode after
strictly following the instructions in the above web page.  And I think
I had set the MBR to active, although I can't really remember.

Even with that hack, however, UEFI just plain didn't work.  It didn't
find the bootable partition; when I tried to get it to look for it it
claimed "Operating System not found" or something along those lines.  It
may well be looking for Windows only, I guess.

Fortunately I can live with legacy boot.  I reinstalled that way,
following a slightly-modified version of the ZFS-root instructions
above, and I'm installing ports as I write this.

So, notwithstanding the lack of UEFI support, success!
-- 
Frank Mayhar
frank at exit.com