# FreeBSD 9.0_RC1 bsdinstall question



## pcohen (Nov 8, 2011)

Hi,

I decided to give a try to FreeBSD 9.0 with the RC1 available. I started recently (I am almost new to FreeBSD) with the 8.2 Release. Install in 8.2 was based on sysinstall and then I had to switch to bsdinstall. I wanted to have something similar to my previous install: 2 "slices" on my boot disk. That means something like:


```
ada0: MBR
  ada0s1: BSDLabel
    ada0s1a: freebsd-ufs /
    ada0s1b: freebsd-swap
and so on
  ada0s2: BSDLabel
```

This partition scheme might be debatable (my second slice was dedicated for an isolated "cache" partition for zfs). With sysinstall, I just had to say I wanted to use FreeBSD boot in MBR and it started like a charm. With 9.0, I was not able to do the same and after the install, system did not start.

Did I miss something with bsdinstall? I did not find any way to add the boot in MBR. I tried to play with the GPart solution but I was even not able to manually configure/create a freebsd-boot type of partition.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Best Regards.


----------



## wblock@ (Nov 8, 2011)

That could be set up in the bsdinstall partition editor.  But a GPT setup should also work, and is simpler.  You must have a freebsd-boot partition with the bootcode, or it won't boot.  See Disk Setup On FreeBSD.


----------



## pcohen (Nov 9, 2011)

wblock@ said:
			
		

> That could be set up in the bsdinstall partition editor.  But a GPT setup should also work, and is simpler.  You must have a freebsd-boot partition with the bootcode, or it won't boot.  See Disk Setup On FreeBSD.



Hi and thanks for the link.
In fact I planned to remain with visual tool during the install and expected to have a behavior close to the sysinstall. Thus I did not give a try to the shell/command line mode. I'll try in the future (perhaps when moving to 9.0-RELEASE).

Thanks again

Regards


----------



## wblock@ (Nov 9, 2011)

Setup should be similar with the bsdinstall partition editor.  I don't know if there's a way to specify the starting point of a partition in that editor, so getting the first UFS partition to start at 1M might be tricky.


----------

