Re: NetBSD 9.0_RC1 - installation on GPT (with BIOS boot) not bootable

[Matthias Petermann <mp%petermann-it.de@localhost>]

Hi Martin,

thanks for following up on my question. Please find my responses below.

On 12/12/19 5:27 PM, Martin Husemann wrote:
> It would be interesting to see more details at this stage:
>   - how does it fail exactly

The affected X220 has a builtin boot menu to select the boot media which 
appears automatically in case the installed HD doesn't qualify as 
bootable. I assume it does some checks to find a boot record(?). 
Unfortunately at this point it doesn't print out any error message. It 
just doesn't boot and drops into the menu. I also checked in BIOS - the 
boot priority is set Legacy.

>   - what does "gpt show -a wd0" print (assuming wd0 is your disk, could
>     be ld0 too if you are on NVME)

# gpt show -s wd0

      start       size  index  contents
          0          1         PMBR (active)
          1          1         Pri GPT header
          2         32         Pri GPT table
         34       2014         Unused
       2048  134215680      1  GPT part - NetBSD FFSv1/FFSv2
                                 Type: ffs
                                 TypeID: 
49f48d5a-b10e-11dc-b99b-0019d1879648
                                 GUID: d2a81618-d8a7-4937-bb41-e42dee047a20
                                 Size: 65535 M
                                 Label: root
                                 Attributes: biosboot, bootme
  134217728       2048         Unused
  134219776   16539648      2  GPT part - NetBSD swap
                                 Type: swap
                                 TypeID: 
49f48d32-b10e-11dc-b99b-0019d1879648
                                 GUID: 4cdabe5b-e105-4849-8316-6fd074118099
                                 Size: 8076 M
                                 Label:
                                 Attributes: None
  150759424  826013711         Unused
  976773135         32         Sec GPT table
  976773167          1         Sec GPT header

During the partition configuration in sysinst, I selected following options:

	- install: yes
	- boot: yes
	- mount options: log
	- label: root

After I noticed that the system is not booting, I tried the following 
exact commands from a shell I got from the USB installation media:

  # gpt biosboot -A -i 1 /dev/wd0
  # installboot -o timeout=30 -v /dev/rdk0 /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv2

> This means something is very wrong and we need to investigate more details.

What came to mind: many years ago I installed freebsd on the same 
device. That would have been around FreeBSD 9 or 10. Back then, 
bsdinstall gave me a warning that there was a BIOS bug for this model 
and asked if I wanted to use a fix for it. I did google this and found a 
discussion in FreeBSD forum[1], as well a mailing list post[2] which 
appears to summarize the needed change. They are talking about setting 
an "active bit" in addition to the "active flag".

I don't understand the context in detail yet, but i will take a look at 
the source of gpart in FreeBSD to find out what this "lenovofix" does. 
At the moment it looks to me like a problem specific to this machine, 
not in general. At least with regards to NetBSD 9.0 RC1, I did not test 
with current so far.

In addition to this, do you see some indication of a problem in the 
provided information above (gpt show)? I am happy to provide more 
details if I know exactly what you need.

Kind regards
Matthias

[1] https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/thinkpad-x220-boot-problem.70865/
[2] 
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-July/056574.html