"Invalid partition table" on 10-stable.

[Frank Mayhar]

Someone please give me a hint of what's going on here. I just got a
Dell Precision M6800. It's not doing UEFI, it's all legacy. I pulled
the installed drive and dropped in a Seagate hybrid 1T drive, then tried
(and tried, and tried, and tried) to install 10-stable on it. I'm using
a memstick image, btw.

No matter what I try and no matter whether I use bsdinstall or do the
gpart stuff by hand, everything goes fine until I try to boot the new
install when all I get is "Invalid partition table!" And nothing.

Am I going to have to use a legacy MBR and disklabel rather than gpt?
Can anyone give me any hints as to what I might look for? I've googled
to no avail (just some stuff from 2010 that doesn't seem to apply).

I really want to follow the setup outlined at
https://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot .

Hmm, is there a way to use, say, grub to do the bootstrap? How would I
go about doing that? And most importantly, would it help?

My head is about to explode so I'm turning to you guys. Even a hint
would help. Thanks.
--
Frank Mayhar
fr...@exit.com

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[Hans Ottevanger]

On 09/18/14 06:11, Frank Mayhar wrote:
> Someone please give me a hint of what's going on here. I just got a
> Dell Precision M6800. It's not doing UEFI, it's all legacy. I pulled
> the installed drive and dropped in a Seagate hybrid 1T drive, then tried
> (and tried, and tried, and tried) to install 10-stable on it. I'm using
> a memstick image, btw.
>
> No matter what I try and no matter whether I use bsdinstall or do the
> gpart stuff by hand, everything goes fine until I try to boot the new
> install when all I get is "Invalid partition table!" And nothing.
>
> Am I going to have to use a legacy MBR and disklabel rather than gpt?
> Can anyone give me any hints as to what I might look for? I've googled
> to no avail (just some stuff from 2010 that doesn't seem to apply).
>
> I really want to follow the setup outlined at
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot .
>
> Hmm, is there a way to use, say, grub to do the bootstrap? How would I
> go about doing that? And most importantly, would it help?
>
> My head is about to explode so I'm turning to you guys. Even a hint
> would help. Thanks.
>

Hi,

I have a similar situation with my oldish Q6600 based systems using an
INTEL DP965LT main-board. After a fresh installation of FreeBSD 10 or
higher (using a GPT scheme) I consistently get the message:

No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key

when rebooting the new installation for the first time.

In my situation I can get the installation working by booting single
user from an older FreeBSD install CD (9.2R in my case) and reinstall
the MBR as follows:

/sbin/gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr ada0

Probably gpart changed the way it installs the MBR, but I think it is
very board (or maybe BIOS) specific: other systems do not have the issue.

Please let me know if this "trick" helps for you.

Kind regards,

Hans

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2014, Frank Mayhar wrote:

> Someone please give me a hint of what's going on here. I just got a
> Dell Precision M6800. It's not doing UEFI, it's all legacy. I pulled
> the installed drive and dropped in a Seagate hybrid 1T drive, then tried
> (and tried, and tried, and tried) to install 10-stable on it. I'm using
> a memstick image, btw.
>
> No matter what I try and no matter whether I use bsdinstall or do the
> gpart stuff by hand, everything goes fine until I try to boot the new
> install when all I get is "Invalid partition table!" And nothing.

If that is the only thing displayed, it's from the BIOS. It would
indicate Dell has done something in the BIOS that expects certain
partition types in an MBR, and chokes on the PMBR. Sometimes a BIOS
update helps.

It's not clear whether this system is UEFI capable. If it is, there are
strict rules for GPT or MBR layout. See
https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?&t=42781

If the message appears after FreeBSD starts to boot, it's from FreeBSD.
The RootOnZFS process looks like it could use an update for partition
alignment and size, but otherwise should work.

[Richard Todd]

Hans Ottevanger <ha...@beastielabs.net> writes:
> Hi,
>
> I have a similar situation with my oldish Q6600 based systems using an
> INTEL DP965LT main-board. After a fresh installation of FreeBSD 10 or
> higher (using a GPT scheme) I consistently get the message:
>
> No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key
>
> when rebooting the new installation for the first time.
>
> In my situation I can get the installation working by booting single
> user from an older FreeBSD install CD (9.2R in my case) and reinstall
> the MBR as follows:
>
> /sbin/gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr ada0
>
> Probably gpart changed the way it installs the MBR, but I think it is
> very board (or maybe BIOS) specific: other systems do not have the
> issue.

I have a DP965LT system, and yes the BIOS is a bit finicky about
the contents of the MBR; I had issues before (pre-GPT days in FreeBSD)
with it not wanting to boot which turned out to be it insisting there
had to be one and only one "active" partition in the MBR. It's
currently running with a GPT PMBR boot record, set up sometime when it
was running 9.x I think. This is what fdisk shows for the MBR on that
machine:
3 blo-rakane /usr/home/rmtodd[ 3:15PM] Z# fdisk /dev/ada0
******* Working on device /dev/ada0 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=484521 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=484521 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 238 (0xee),(EFI GPT)
start 1, size 488397167 (238475 Meg), flag 80 (active)
beg: cyl 0/ head 0/ sector 2;
end: cyl 1023/ head 255/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
<UNUSED>

Note the "active" flag present on the GPT fake-MBR-partition.

[Frank Mayhar]

Hans Ottevanger <hans <at> beastielabs.net> writes:
> In my situation I can get the installation working by booting single
> user from an older FreeBSD install CD (9.2R in my case) and reinstall
> the MBR as follows:
>
> /sbin/gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr ada0
>
> Probably gpart changed the way it installs the MBR, but I think it is
> very board (or maybe BIOS) specific: other systems do not have the issue.
>
> Please let me know if this "trick" helps for you.

I did install the pmbr during the initial setup, as well as the bootstrap
itself. I do plan to try the "set active partition" trick suggested
elsewhere.
--
Frank Mayhar
fma...@gmail.com

[Wojciech Puchar]

>>
>> /sbin/gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr ada0
>>
>> Probably gpart changed the way it installs the MBR, but I think it is
>> very board (or maybe BIOS) specific: other systems do not have the issue.
>>
>> Please let me know if this "trick" helps for you.
>
> I did install the pmbr during the initial setup, as well as the bootstrap
> itself. I do plan to try the "set active partition" trick suggested
> elsewhere.

while it may not solve your problems i prefer to NEVER make MBR partitions
at all, only bsdlabel.

example:

[root@laptop ~]# bsdlabel ada0
# /dev/ada0:
8 partitions:
# size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
a: 249984 16 4.2BSD 0 0 0
b: 4750000 250000 swap
c: 117210240 0 unused 0 0 # "raw" part, don't edit
d: 63332672 5000000 4.2BSD 0 0 0
h: 48877568 68332672 4.2BSD 0 0 0

simply do

bsdlabel -B disk

to make it bootable.

[Frank Mayhar]

On Fri, 2014-09-19 at 00:03 +0200, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> >>
> >> /sbin/gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr ada0
> >>
> >> Probably gpart changed the way it installs the MBR, but I think it is
> >> very board (or maybe BIOS) specific: other systems do not have the issue.
> >>
> >> Please let me know if this "trick" helps for you.
> >
> > I did install the pmbr during the initial setup, as well as the bootstrap
> > itself. I do plan to try the "set active partition" trick suggested
> > elsewhere.
> while it may not solve your problems i prefer to NEVER make MBR partitions
> at all, only bsdlabel.
>
> example:
>
> [root@laptop ~]# bsdlabel ada0
> # /dev/ada0:
> 8 partitions:
> # size offset fstype [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
> a: 249984 16 4.2BSD 0 0 0
> b: 4750000 250000 swap
> c: 117210240 0 unused 0 0 # "raw" part, don't edit
> d: 63332672 5000000 4.2BSD 0 0 0
> h: 48877568 68332672 4.2BSD 0 0 0
>
> simply do
>
> bsdlabel -B disk
>
> to make it bootable.

Well, my pmbr isn't really an MBR, it's just the fake one to make things
"work right" as I understand it. In fact, I don't really understand it,
or why it's necessary, but it's pretty clear that something's funky
here.

I'm planning to avoid disk/bsdlabel entirely in favor of gpart, GPT and
zfs. (I'm dead set on using ZFS; I don't trust UFS nearly as much as I
used to.)
--
Frank Mayhar
fr...@exit.com

[Frank Mayhar]

On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 21:11 -0700, Frank Mayhar wrote:
> Someone please give me a hint of what's going on here. I just got a
> Dell Precision M6800. It's not doing UEFI, it's all legacy. I pulled
> the installed drive and dropped in a Seagate hybrid 1T drive, then tried
> (and tried, and tried, and tried) to install 10-stable on it. I'm using
> a memstick image, btw.
>
> No matter what I try and no matter whether I use bsdinstall or do the
> gpart stuff by hand, everything goes fine until I try to boot the new
> install when all I get is "Invalid partition table!" And nothing.
>
> Am I going to have to use a legacy MBR and disklabel rather than gpt?
> Can anyone give me any hints as to what I might look for? I've googled
> to no avail (just some stuff from 2010 that doesn't seem to apply).
>
> I really want to follow the setup outlined at
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot .

Well, I got it going. In fact, when I got home last night I found that
it was sitting there running FreeBSD off the disk. After some
experimentation, I found that I had left it in legacy boot mode after
strictly following the instructions in the above web page. And I think
I had set the MBR to active, although I can't really remember.

Even with that hack, however, UEFI just plain didn't work. It didn't
find the bootable partition; when I tried to get it to look for it it
claimed "Operating System not found" or something along those lines. It
may well be looking for Windows only, I guess.

Fortunately I can live with legacy boot. I reinstalled that way,
following a slightly-modified version of the ZFS-root instructions
above, and I'm installing ports as I write this.

So, notwithstanding the lack of UEFI support, success!

[Nathan Whitehorn]

Did you have secure boot enabled?
-Nathan

[Frank Mayhar]

On Fri, 2014-09-19 at 09:57 -0700, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
> On 09/19/14 04:49, Frank Mayhar wrote:
> > Well, I got it going. In fact, when I got home last night I found that
> > it was sitting there running FreeBSD off the disk. After some
> > experimentation, I found that I had left it in legacy boot mode after
> > strictly following the instructions in the above web page. And I think
> > I had set the MBR to active, although I can't really remember.
> >
> > Even with that hack, however, UEFI just plain didn't work. It didn't
> > find the bootable partition; when I tried to get it to look for it it
> > claimed "Operating System not found" or something along those lines. It
> > may well be looking for Windows only, I guess.
> >
> > Fortunately I can live with legacy boot. I reinstalled that way,
> > following a slightly-modified version of the ZFS-root instructions
> > above, and I'm installing ports as I write this.
> >
> > So, notwithstanding the lack of UEFI support, success!
>
> Did you have secure boot enabled?

No, definitely not.
--
Frank Mayhar
fr...@exit.com

[Wojciech Puchar]

>
> Well, my pmbr isn't really an MBR, it's just the fake one to make things
> "work right" as I understand it. In fact, I don't really understand it,
> or why it's necessary, but it's pretty clear that something's funky
> here.

it is only necessary if you use FreeBSD installer.

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 09/20/14 05:10, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>>
>> Well, my pmbr isn't really an MBR, it's just the fake one to make things
>> "work right" as I understand it. In fact, I don't really understand it,
>> or why it's necessary, but it's pretty clear that something's funky
>> here.
>
> it is only necessary if you use FreeBSD installer.
>

Could you describe the exact problem here so that we can fix the
installer? If this is the mark one partition active thing, I'm not sure
we can change that, since there are also systems *that* breaks.
-Nathan

[Frank Mayhar]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 9:34 AM, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhit...@freebsd.org>
wrote:

> Could you describe the exact problem here so that we can fix the
> installer? If this is the mark one partition active thing, I'm not sure we
> can change that, since there are also systems *that* breaks.
>

I'm not sure I can describe the *exact* problem, since I don't completely
understand it. What I can say that if I put the laptop into legacy-boot
mode and mark the partition active, it boots. If I put it into UEFI boot
mode and install, even if I install the pmbr and mark it active, the BIOS
doesn't find it. This is a bit different message from the earlier one I
quoted, it's a set of messages clearly from the BIOS claiming that it can't
find a boot partition; I can reproduce it and quote it exactly if it would
help. It also offers ways to go to Setup, retry the boot or run
diagnostics. Marking the partition inactive doesn't help, in fact I
couldn't figure out any way to make it detect the partition. In the BIOS,
where you choose UEFI, it has a search function. In legacy mode it finds
all the possible boot devices, but in UEFI it claims, IIRC, that it can't
find an operating system and produces no list of potential boot devices.

This is on a Dell Precision M6800, as I said before. If you have any more
questions, feel free to ask.
--
Frank Mayhar
fma...@gmail.com

[Andrey Fesenko]

On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 5:46 PM, Frank Mayhar <fma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 9:34 AM, Nathan Whitehorn <nwhit...@freebsd.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Could you describe the exact problem here so that we can fix the
>> installer? If this is the mark one partition active thing, I'm not sure we
>> can change that, since there are also systems *that* breaks.
>>
>
> I'm not sure I can describe the *exact* problem, since I don't completely
> understand it. What I can say that if I put the laptop into legacy-boot
> mode and mark the partition active, it boots. If I put it into UEFI boot
> mode and install, even if I install the pmbr and mark it active, the BIOS
> doesn't find it. This is a bit different message from the earlier one I
> quoted, it's a set of messages clearly from the BIOS claiming that it can't
> find a boot partition; I can reproduce it and quote it exactly if it would
> help. It also offers ways to go to Setup, retry the boot or run
> diagnostics. Marking the partition inactive doesn't help, in fact I
> couldn't figure out any way to make it detect the partition. In the BIOS,
> where you choose UEFI, it has a search function. In legacy mode it finds
> all the possible boot devices, but in UEFI it claims, IIRC, that it can't
> find an operating system and produces no list of potential boot devices.
>
> This is on a Dell Precision M6800, as I said before. If you have any more
> questions, feel free to ask.
> --
> Frank Mayhar
> fma...@gmail.com

If I understand correctly, it is a problem of some BIOS laptops. I
have Lenovo X220 he also loaded only when partition support in the
mbr.

GPT table, and have a new EFI boot lead either to not recognize the
media, or to reboot without warning.
But in this scheme, the notebook is perfectly loaded with ZFS-only system

=> 63 234441585 ada1 MBR (112G)
63 234441585 1 freebsd [active] (112G)

=> 0 234441585 ada1s1 BSD (112G)
0 234441585 1 freebsd-zfs (112G)

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 09/21/14 06:46, Frank Mayhar wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 20, 2014 at 9:34 AM, Nathan Whitehorn
> <nwhit...@freebsd.org <mailto:nwhit...@freebsd.org>> wrote:
>
> Could you describe the exact problem here so that we can fix the
> installer? If this is the mark one partition active thing, I'm not
> sure we can change that, since there are also systems *that* breaks.
>
>
> I'm not sure I can describe the *exact* problem, since I don't
> completely understand it. What I can say that if I put the laptop
> into legacy-boot mode and mark the partition active, it boots. If I
> put it into UEFI boot mode and install, even if I install the pmbr and
> mark it active, the BIOS doesn't find it. This is a bit different
> message from the earlier one I quoted, it's a set of messages clearly
> from the BIOS claiming that it can't find a boot partition; I can
> reproduce it and quote it exactly if it would help. It also offers
> ways to go to Setup, retry the boot or run diagnostics. Marking the
> partition inactive doesn't help, in fact I couldn't figure out any way
> to make it detect the partition. In the BIOS, where you choose UEFI,
> it has a search function. In legacy mode it finds all the possible
> boot devices, but in UEFI it claims, IIRC, that it can't find an
> operating system and produces no list of potential boot devices.
>
> This is on a Dell Precision M6800, as I said before. If you have any
> more questions, feel free to ask.
> --
> Frank Mayhar

> fma...@gmail.com <mailto:fma...@gmail.com>

One more: can you boot the UEFI memstick image in UEFI mode? There's a
possible misfeature in the firmware I want to check for.
-Nathan