Re: GPT/UEFI booting

[Robert Nestor <rnestor%mac.com@localhost>]

When I was a young man doing IT support I was always frustrated to find a user who needed help but had sprinkled his scripts with all sorts of random commands he’d found someplace.  Now that I’m an old man I find myself doing that very same thing, so I understand and appreciate your confusion and frustration on my screwed up approach.  :-)

However, I faithfully implemented your advice and lo-and-behold I almost have a booting system!  It does come up with the NetBSD boot menu and then fails because it can’t find the NetBSD kernel file on hd0a.  Of course, that’s the EFI/FAT16 partition, so I entered “boot hd0b:netbsd” at the prompt and I’m up and running!

I’m thinking there must be some configuration file I can play with that modifies this behavior, but for now I’m one happy camper!

Thanks for the help,
-bob

On Feb 28, 2017, at 1:33 PM, Aymeric Vincent <aymericvincent%free.fr@localhost> wrote:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have it working on two such laptops; here are a couple of comments
> which could help.
> 
> Robert Nestor <rnestor%mac.com@localhost> writes:
> 
>> newfs_msdos -F 16 /dev/rdk0
> 
> I didn't specify -F 16 here and this partition is 512MiB on my laptops.
> 
>> newfs /dev/dk1
> 
> This should really be /dev/rdk1 (char device, same for other newfs's).
> 
> It looks to me like you are installing both a MBR bios boot and a UEFI
> boot. As you mention that your BIOS sort of supports both, it could be
> misleading.
> 
> The two next commands are what is needed. I didn't check if if was
> necessary but I used "mount_msdos -l /dev/xxx /mntxxx" to force using
> long filenames because I don't remember what is the default when
> mounting an empty msdos filesystem.
> 
>> mkdir -p /mnt2/EFI/boot
>> cp /mnt/usr/mdec/*.efi /mnt2/EFI/boot/
> 
> The next three commands are IMHO useless (or harmful?) for UEFI boot.
> 
>> gpt biosboot -A -i 1 ld0
>> cp /mnt/usr/mdec/boot /mnt
>> installboot /dev/rdk1 /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1
> 
> Also, I aligned my EFI partition to 1MiB because Linux does it (-a 1M);
> not sure if it's necessary but it could also be friendlier to flash
> storage.
> 
> Regards,
> Aymeric