Booting EFI system without EFI loader

[Tomasz Kowalczyk]

In general, if you have EFI partition on your disk, u can use it to store boot loaders.
If u can boot FreeBSD in any way, u can check there :

gpart show

Then mount_msdosfs /dev/adaXpY /anywhere your EFI partition.
Next you do

mkdir -p /yourEFImountpoint/EFI/freebsd
cp /boot/loader.efi /yourEFImountpoint/EFI/freebsd/

Next part is adding your FreeBSD boot loader to your Bios.

efibootmgr -c -L FreeBSD -l /yourEFImountpoint/EFI/freebsd/loader.efi

Reboot system, and hit F12(or any other key) to select boot option
You should see FreeBSD there.

> On 7 Sep 2020, at 03:47, Kevin Oberman <rkoberman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I know it's possible, because I did it once by accident. Now I need to do
> it again.
> I had completed the installation and tried to boot the new system. It
> worked when I tried to boot the USB stick, but something failed with the
> message that no valid system was found and prompted for the bot drive. I
> entered ufs:disk0p6: and the newly installed system came up! I then updated
> to current and built the world and kernel and installed the kernel. Now I
> need to reboot.
> 
> I can't figure out how to get the loader to ask for the boot disk
> (partition). I tried installing the loader into the efi partition as per
> the handbook, but my system was too smart. It didn't like the new
> bootx86.efi file and "fixed" it! ARG!
> 
> Any clue as to how to force my system to boot and NOT "AUTOREPAIR" itself?
> I want to install rEFInd using Niclas Z's instructions as soon as can.
> 
> I seem to be asking for help a lot, but I have not had to deal with this
> stuff since going to EFI. FWIW, the system is a Lenovo L15 (Intel).
> --
> Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
> E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com
> PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683
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