Configure booting for GhostBSD

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Jes
Posts: 42
Joined: Sun Dec 25, 2016 2:43 pm
Location: Spain
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Configure booting for GhostBSD

Post by Jes »

Hi all:

I have a problem since first time I installed Ghostbsd. It's about booting the system. The laptop I have ghostbsd installed has two SSDs. First one with Linux and Grub2. Second one with GhostBSD.

I have grub in the first disk configured to boot GhostBSD from the second disk. This works and it's the regular way I boot GhostBSD.

But I want to be able to boot GhostBSD from the second disk. And this is what I'm not able to configure.

The second disk has the following structure:

gpart show ada1
=> 34 488397101 ada1 GPT (233G)
34 6 - free - (3.0K)
40 204800 1 efi [bootme] (100M)
204840 471697408 2 freebsd-ufs [bootme] (225G)
471902248 16484352 3 freebsd-swap (7.9G)
488386600 10535 - free - (5.1M)

The efi slice is from installations with ZFS previous to install GhostBSD.

I've tried copying /boot/boot1.efi into the efi partition as BOOT/BOOTx64.EFI or efi/BOOT/BOOTx64.EFI. No success.

I've tried grub2-pcbsd doing this:

mount -t msdosfs /dev/gptid/5627a755-7a78-11e6-89fa-f0def16accb5 /boot/efi
grub-install --efi-directory=/boot/efi --removable --target=x86_64-efi --force /dev/ada1

but not success either.

Any has an idea how to deal with this?

Thanks in advance,

Jes
Jes
Posts: 42
Joined: Sun Dec 25, 2016 2:43 pm
Location: Spain
Contact:

Re: Configure booting for GhostBSD

Post by Jes »

Unable to configure boot with EFI. I had have to change to Bios Boot mode and Grub.

From another distro (in my first disk) I delete the EFI partition to create a new one, with 1M and type "Bios Boot" (ef02 if I remember well from gdisk).

gpart show ada1:

=> 34 488397101 ada1 GPT (233G)
34 6 - free - (3.0K)
40 2048 1 bios-boot (1.0M)
2088 202752 - free - (99M)
204840 471697408 2 freebsd-ufs [bootme] (225G)
471902248 16484352 3 freebsd-swap (7.9G)
488386600 10535 - free - (5.1M)


Then, from GhostBSD I've installed the pcbsd version of grub2 (grub2 original didn't build the configuration with grub-mkconfig).

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pkg install grub2-pcbsd-2.02q_10
In /usr/local/etc/grub/40_custom add to the end:

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set timeout = 3
menuentry "GhostBSD 10.3" {
insmod ufs2
     set root = (hd1, gpt2)
     kfreebsd /boot/loader
}

Create /usr/local/etc/default/grub and put into:

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GRUB_DEFAULT=saved 
GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true
This permits Grub saves the last menu entry selected.

Then generate an automatic configuration file with:

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grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
To install

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grub-install --modules=part_gpt /dev/ada1
If everything goes ok the output should be like:

Code: Select all

Installing for i386-pc platform.
Installation finished. No error reported.
There is a small error when the custom menu entry is selected but after another "Enter" GhostBSD boots perfectly. I'd have to refine this custom entry.

If instead of Grub we want to use the FreeBSD boot loader, the Bios Boot partition should be "freebsd-boot" type and size 512K and type a501 (if I remember well). Then, from GhostBSD, we would do:

Code: Select all

gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 ada1
if the freebsd-boot partition is the first partition.

This page has helped me a lot:

http://wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html
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