Quote:
Originally Posted by NaWi
Only a crazy idea, could it be, that the boot freezes and the reason is the same as if your / root filesystem is to big that the bootloader can't find the kernel ? Something like partitions on the wrong place.
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That thought had crossed my mind as well. My OpenBSD partition sits at the end and comprises less than 10% of the entire drive. However, the fact I can't even boot from the miniroot*.fs on USB somehow refutes that argument.
I still haven't had time to go through the hybrid MBR link you gave me, but I downloaded and booted SystemRescueCD. Although Linux-based it comes with GPT-fdisk. gdisk found nothing wrong with the partition table on my hard drive, it only complained about those on the USB drives. I let it fix those and tried to boot again from the miniroot images but no change in behaviour. I also tested the May 29th amd64 snapshot: same as before. Of course the EFI code is still very new and AFAIK only present in the amd64 and (since yesterday) ARMv7 snapshots, as reported on undeadly.
I do have some interesting news, though: I can boot FreeBSD from USB without any problems whatsoever. I used FreeBSD-10.3-RELEASE-amd64-uefi-memstick.img for that. I even started to install from the booted USB drive to a second USB drive. Only aborted it because I was unsure about some partitioning decisions. So I'll probably pop over to the FreeBSD section here for some advice to see if I can get a running FreeBSD install as some sort of intermediary solution.
As for OSX I'm not particularly fond of it. Got the macbook out of necessity when an older ibook died and I quickly needed a replacement. Spend more than a week configuring away stuff and behaviour I didn't like. In the end I just got used to it, that's all. My main requirements are VirtualBox on which I have a clean install of XP with the configuration software for a PBX system and apart from that Sheepshaver which i need for some older mac emulation testing stuff that's currently dormant. It seems both may be available at least on FreeBSD so there may be an intermediary migrational roadmap for me. Something like Free and Open dual-boot perhaps...
To cut a long story short, I'll probably hold off on any single-boot hard drive installations until I have a viable install on a usb-drive to keep going. Meanwhile I'll keep trying to narrow down possible interference factors like partitioning etc. Of course I'll report any developments in this thread.
Final parting thought for the day: If FreeBSD can boot from USB without problems, couldn't it theoretically be possible to borrow that EFI code over to OpenBSD?