When I was a young man doing IT support I was always frustrated to find a user who needed help but had sprinkled his scripts with all sorts of random commands he’d found someplace. Now that I’m an old man I find myself doing that very same thing, so I understand and appreciate your confusion and frustration on my screwed up approach. :-)
However, I faithfully implemented your advice and lo-and-behold I almost have a booting system! It does come up with the NetBSD boot menu and then fails because it can’t find the NetBSD kernel file on hd0a. Of course, that’s the EFI/FAT16 partition, so I entered “boot hd0b:netbsd” at the prompt and I’m up and running! I’m thinking there must be some configuration file I can play with that modifies this behavior, but for now I’m one happy camper! Thanks for the help, -bob On Feb 28, 2017, at 1:33 PM, Aymeric Vincent <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > I have it working on two such laptops; here are a couple of comments > which could help. > > Robert Nestor <[email protected]> writes: > >> newfs_msdos -F 16 /dev/rdk0 > > I didn't specify -F 16 here and this partition is 512MiB on my laptops. > >> newfs /dev/dk1 > > This should really be /dev/rdk1 (char device, same for other newfs's). > > It looks to me like you are installing both a MBR bios boot and a UEFI > boot. As you mention that your BIOS sort of supports both, it could be > misleading. > > The two next commands are what is needed. I didn't check if if was > necessary but I used "mount_msdos -l /dev/xxx /mntxxx" to force using > long filenames because I don't remember what is the default when > mounting an empty msdos filesystem. > >> mkdir -p /mnt2/EFI/boot >> cp /mnt/usr/mdec/*.efi /mnt2/EFI/boot/ > > The next three commands are IMHO useless (or harmful?) for UEFI boot. > >> gpt biosboot -A -i 1 ld0 >> cp /mnt/usr/mdec/boot /mnt >> installboot /dev/rdk1 /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1 > > Also, I aligned my EFI partition to 1MiB because Linux does it (-a 1M); > not sure if it's necessary but it could also be friendlier to flash > storage. > > Regards, > Aymeric
