MBR not GPT?

[sharris]

Can anyone write a simple easy to follow how-to, using this link, but for UFS format ONLY with standard style slices. In other words, alter FBSD-9.0 release so it can dual-boot with others os like it did for the pass 20 year without the need of ZFS or anything else. ZFS and GPT is cool but I'm not going to be force to use something that most users will never need until QUANTUM. I mean, how many webtop and mobile devices will need to break the 2 terabyte barrier??? Anyway after days of trying I can figure out how to translate this to gain the desired result.

http://daemon-notes.com/articles/ins...nstall-zfs/zfs

Thanks in advance

[roddierod]

I think i'm missing your problem? FreeBSD 9 doesn't require you to use ZFS and the install has an option to use mbr and not gpt. I opted to use gpt as it suppose to be better than mbr, but I'm not using ZFS.

[shep]

If your goal is to dual boot a system using mbr/ufs maybe the easiest thing is to delete gpt - my understanding is you can rewrite gpt if the need arises in the future. One tidbit of information I can supply is that Western Digital HD I used had a backup gpt on the last 2 sectors. Deleting gpt entails zeroing out the first 2 and last 2 sectors.

[sharris]

Guys, I been posting about this problem all last year and no one ever said a word, well at lease no one knew the solution. Obviously, not everyone knew how-to before the links you are about to see. I been drowning deeper into misery every since posting this thread and was ready to jump-ship for CentOS-6 or the best to be had. My attempt was soo sad, than I just found this:

[10-02-2011] by wblock FreeBSD Developer
http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.p...0&postcount=13

[12-31-2011] by wblock FreeBSD Developer
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=28641


I created only 40 GB worth of slices:

HD original sz	80.0 GB
FreeBSD	claim	79456.92MB
Few space left	542.10MB

As you see FreeBSD claim more than the 40GB given to slices. No big deal. I'm sure I can dump the system and put it into any other machine that has a 100GB PRIMARY waiting for it. If not, on all other machines I have scripts ready for PcBSD which is on PRIMARY-2 to take care of this. And if not again, I'll dd the entire UFS PRIMARY to file and save it to a USB flash stick using ARCH-LINUX to get the job done.

One thing for sure, I'm not going to use this installer on my main machines just to see if FreeBSD will not claim the entire drive, destroying all of my working partitions. This happen to me twice last year because confident was high ... As you see on my test/dump machine it did it AGAIN!

Anyway, what wblock have give-if is more than enough. Unless all of this got fixed around 9.0 rc2 it is amazing how something as simple as "Select Create on desired drive again ... " ... may have caused many an entire year of unhappiness and to think the top guys at FreeBSD never said a word while hundreds of users begged for the answers since day the installer was changed back in late May or June. Maybe they did not even know!!!. It's just too bad wblock threads are now buried so deep that satin can't find them. I was just plain lucky to find the main one.

Thank God for wblock!

[jb_daefo]

 # /linuxfdisk/ # fdisk-linux -u -l /dev/ada0

May be of interest if not here, for others reading this thread... if they are mucking around with arithmetic.

[sharris]

arithmetic is the problem with FreeBSD and gpart. I always create multiple slices. I need all my PRIMARIES and EXTENDED so I can use and test any OS with anything in VirtualBox when I feel like it, using an single machine. You get 6 slices with PcBSD and 7 with FreeBSD, meaning 1 and 2 pass the /usr slice. Anyway, last year I had to leave a fine balance between 517MB - 1000MB of free-space when ever I created my OWN slices with PcBSD-8.2. That was the beginning of it all. Than FBSD made changes to the installer trying to use PcBSD gpart idea (or is it visa-vera), who knows.

Notice my FreeBSD install in my 2nd post. I did not order this but FreeBSD claim the whole drive but not 542.10MB. WHY??? Because it will not work if the whole disk with gpart or who ever. I claim the whole disk with FREEBSD-9.0-RELEASE in a test, just hours ago and IT DID NOT WORK. I'm doing my **FINAL** set-up now. I tested all possible ways and now I know what to do. This time, thanks to wblock I made all 7 slices using MBR and I claim 79-GB of the 80-GB hard drive. After install and doing a test run, I'll do [sda] to clone the ENTIRE hdd:

USE LINUX FOR ALL OF THIS or LET A LIVE BSD CD GIVE YOU PURE HELL!!!

COPY A PARTITION:
I use the second one for dos 4GB limitation. Never over look the dot, dash, space, etc.

dd if=/dev/sda2 ibs=4096 | gzip > /b/pcbsd-82.gz
......................................................
dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -c | split -b 3999m - /b/freebsd-90-full-partition.gz.

While all of that is now going on, after backing up my life work, I dd my baby, my other machine 500GB hard drive, wiped CLEAN!!!

WIPE A HARD-DRIVE:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M conv=notrunc,noerror

Than I move my favorite OS (fbsd-9.0) to my baby PRIMARY-1. This been FreeBSD home from day-1.

RESTORE A PARTITION:

gunzip -dc /b/pcbsd-82.gz | dd of=/dev/sda2
......................................................
cat /b/freebsd-90-full-partition.gz.* | gzip -dc | dd of=/dev/sda bs-1M

Now all I got to do is add my other partitions, dd-saved as PcBSD, Win-Vista, Win-7[32], Win-7[64] and soon Windows-8 and I hope they did not do the same thing that FreeBSD got twisted up in. Yes it is a math problem, they best to dump gPart or loss out to LINUX completely and I hope they don't sell-out to Google like MySQL did.

Good Luck Everybody

[sharris]

I'm finish and it WORKS!

I don't think FBSD is going back and if there is not a better way you need to know one final thing.

Just clone FreeBSD sda1 partition and NOT the entire hard drive using sda like i mention above .. because you will take the GPTs that are at both the beginning and end of the disk. In the matter of fact this breaks the whole GPT thing because it is stuck behind sda1 and you are FREE to add all other PRIMARIES there-after. This destroyed the take-over of the entire disk. Just for the record, now you know that the other half of GPT is in the MBR at bs=512 count=2

I was lucky to pay attention. To completely solve this problem; after wiping you giant HDD, use cfdisk or Partition Commander to make a 80GB (or your exact size of the smaller drive that you are stripping 9.0 from) UFS partition and make it bootable. Than copy your stripped FreeBSD-sda1 image to sda1 on the giant HDD ... Now things are back to normal!

I am soooo happy!
I may never upgrade again.

....
....
I just found this 4 hours after posting this thread.

Would I be wrong to think all of this was by design, prompting for the new trend to be the ONE and only??? I bet all GPT got something to do with this:

... users won't be able to deactivate secure booting and (therefore) install another operating system. Clearly that's not gone down well with people

http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/17/m...-requirements/
....

[sharris]

Well, I been reading where utilizing PXE network booting would allow the computer to NOT allow the CD/DVD booting of the network (not sure about USB). So it seems that FreeBSD as a SERVER this does add another level of network security. But as far as a MS Desktop Windows there is no excuse what-so-ever but the money per-devices per-OS to be made, for FREE.

Now I understand what roddierod meant when he said "gpt is better". He was referring to server use only as it should be since this is UNIX. Only i lost focus so sorry about that FreeBSD. Anyway, now we got a choise from of secure-booting a network or happiness of muti-booting a private desktop(s) and server(s) and all you have to do is drop the FBSD partition back between the GPT, the jail for the HDD, as you make improvement to it elsewhere ... it's a WIN! WIN! situation and you save a bank-roll too

bye.