apart difficulties

[Andrey V. Elsukov]

On 17.10.2017 07:13, Christopher Bowman wrote:
> 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

BSD label uses embedded into partition table bootcode. You need to use
"-b /boot/boot" argument to install it.
What is going in your case:
BSD label metadata was stored in first sector of da0s1 and GEOM object
of PART_BSD class was created. Then you added partitions, that starts
from zero offset, i.e. it contains BSD label metadata. Then /boot/boot
content was written into da0s1a, and it has overridden BSD label. But
since da0s1a is separate GEOM provider, the spoiling did not worked for
da0s1.

-- 
WBR, Andrey V. Elsukov

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