apart difficulties

[Christopher Bowman]

Roberto,
	I’m not sure all my machines can boot a gpt partition so I wanted the least common denominator.  I have a handful of these cheap small flash sticks that I intend to use for various version and there isn’t really a benefit to gpt (except that it might actually work).
	I would look into the code but I haven’t a clue where that would be and I figured someone else might be more of an expert in this area and could find it faster.
	Thanks for the comments and the gpt suggestion, I may actually try that.
Christopher

> On Oct 17, 2017, at 12:02 AM, Roberto Fernández <roberfern at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Cristopher,
> 
> before starting I was wandering why have you chose a MBR partitioning
> scheme instead of a GPT one, but never the less, I will try to help
> you with that.
> 
> 2017-10-17 6:13 GMT+02:00 Christopher Bowman <crb at chrisbowman.com <mailto:crb at chrisbowman.com>>:
>> I have a home server with a fairly large amount of zfs disk space where I keep all of my persistent data.  As a result when new releases of FreeBSD come out I tend backup the root images of my machines to the zfs pool and, starting with the least important box, I blow away all the local partitions and reinstall from scratch.  Then I mount the server zfspool and restore config files and packages.  As a result my machines stay pretty up to date and clean.  Lately rather than burning DVDs I’ve decided that I will create a usb boot disks containing the entire DVD contents and simply go down the line and and install on one machine after the other.  My machine can now all boot off USB but don’t all have DVD drives.
>> 
>> I have the following script below which I was using to try configure an MBR bootable memory stick.  The commented out lines are a reminder to myself of how to copy over the ISO contents to the slice I create (I only do this when there is a new release so I forget.)
>> 
>> gpart create -s MBR da0
>> gpart add -i 1 -t freebsd da0
>> gpart set -a active -i 1 da0
>> gpart bootcode -b /boot/mbr da0
>> gpart create -s BSD -n 8 da0s1
>> gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -i 1 da0s1
>> gpart bootcode -p /boot/boot -i 1 da0s1
> 
> If you do here the following (instead of what you did above) should
> work just fine:
> gpart create -s GPT da0
> gpart add -i1 -s 256k -t freebsd-boot -b 40 da0
> gpart add -i2 -t freebsd-ufs da0
> gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot -i1 da0
> 
> If you insist in having a BSD partitioning inside a MBR one, I should
> took a deeper look into the code and analyze why it is not working as
> it should.
> 
>> # newfs da0s1a
>> # mount /dev/da0s1a /mnt/usb
>> # mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /u1/ISOs/FreeBSD/11.1/FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso
>> # mount -t cd9660 /dev/md0 /mnt/dvd
>> # cp -pr /mnt/dvd/* /mnt/usb
>> # umount /mnt/usb
>> 
>> What I’ve found that’s interesting is that the slice creation doesn’t seem to be persistent.  By that I mean that if I run the above script (included the commented stuff.)  I can clearly see the /mnt/usb contents are the same as the DVD.  If I then unmount /mnt/usb and remove the stick when I put it back in gpart show doesn’t seems to show the BSD label, just the MBR slice
>> 
>> If I reinsert and do the following:
>> gpart create -s BSD -n 8 da0s1
>> gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -i 1 da0s1
>> gpart bootcode -p /boot/boot -i 1 da0s1
>> fsck /dev/da0s1a
>> mount /dev/da0s1a /mnt/usb
>> 
>> Then the file system is there just as before.  The slice creation doesn’t seem persistent.  Am I missing something?  Is there something I have to do to commit the slice?  Is this a bug?
>> 
>> I appreciate your help.
>> 
>> Christopher
>> _______________________________________________
>> freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org <mailto:freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org> mailing list
>> https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers <https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers>
>> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscribe at freebsd.org <mailto:freebsd-hackers-unsubscribe at freebsd.org>"