# More bsdinstall issues



## ikbendeman (Oct 27, 2013)

I'm not going to state all of the obvious that the community has about the switch to the BSD install installer.

However, is anyone else having the same issues as I am? I have to use a suggested partition layout or bootloader can't find my kernel. This is true both for ZFS and UFS, GPT and MBR, so I guess I'm stuck with one huge root partition. Ridiculous. Any advice from anyone (besides installing 8.x, compiling sources, and upgrading that route)? Please help. This installation program is extremely frustrating.


----------



## wblock@ (Oct 27, 2013)

More specifics would help.  We can't tell what hardware you are using or the install steps taken.


----------



## kpa (Oct 27, 2013)

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/bsdinstall-partitioning.html

I just tried this using the FreeBSD-9.2-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso CD-image under VirtualBox. I was able to create a booting system by following the manual partitioning instructions of the handbook and the "Example 2.3. Creating Traditional Split Filesystem Partitions" part (minus a separate partition for /tmp but that does not matter). Otherwise I used the default options for everything.


----------



## SirDice (Oct 28, 2013)

If you came from Linux it's common to create a separate partition for /boot/, don't do that on FreeBSD.


----------



## ikbendeman (Oct 30, 2013)

I didn't create a boot partition for FreeBSD except for the 64k freebsd-boot thing on GPT.
Partitions created:

```
/
/var
/tmp
/usr/
/usr/home
swap
```
And it simply wouldn't boot. Even when I installed boot0 manually, it would get stuck at boot1 or boot2, not sure which (I still get them confused). 

I finally got it to boot using GPT defaults (root and swap; sucks)

I'll probably try to do a 10.0 ZFS install on my other drive but ZFS seems so... memory hungry. Then again I have a 4 GHz 8 core FX with 16 GB of RAM at 1866 MHz, so zfs shouldn't slow it down too much. Is it possible to dual boot root ZFS with Windows 7 per chance (I have a weakness for Fallout)?


----------



## wblock@ (Oct 30, 2013)

The partition layout is not likely to stop the system from booting.  http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?p=149210&postcount=13 shows creating a custom MBR layout with bsdinstall(8).

If you have not changed that disk, please boot the install CD into Shell mode and show the output of `gpart show`.  Or use mfsBSD.


----------



## ikbendeman (Oct 31, 2013)

Again, I recognize the partitioning scheme is not the issue. It worked with 8.0 maybe ill I'll back up all my packages and do ZFS root. When I tried that though *I* got an error about mismatched cylinder something or other when running `gpart create -s 64K -t freebsd-boot ada0`.

I miss the installer we had on 8.0. Will bsdinstall soon support ZFS root install without manual intervention?


----------



## wblock@ (Oct 31, 2013)

ikbendeman said:
			
		

> Will bsdinstall soon support zfs root install without manual intervention?



Yes.


----------

