Hello, first of all, please bare with me, as the last time I used NetBSD was circa 5.0 on a Pentium III system for a low traffic email server (and was very happy with it).
Here is my situation. I am trying to install NetBSD 8.0_BETA from USB drive on a separate 64GB SSD drive in my workstation. However I'm at a complete loss. The workstation is an i5-4xxx, UEFI (albeit a bit broken, but most are anyway) mobo. Currently the system is running Linux from 2 other SSD drives in a btrfs raid1 setup, also attached a 1TB SATA HDD for storage. I decided to attach another SSD and try to install NetBSD, because, well, why not. Unfortunately I'm not doing something right and can't make the install work. I would like to use GPT/EFI boot on that machine, and browsing around the lists, it seems this is entirely possible. However when I try to boot the machine in EFI mode the installation just halts at "netbsd:efi_getsystbl". So either NetBSD kernel could not communicate with the EFI of my mobo, or just the EFI of my mobo is eF-ed (bad pun). I switched to legacy boot and I'm now able to boot the installation, however here I get completely lost. I tried setting up my SSD with a GPT partition scheme, but no matter how I try, I can't seem to install NetBSD, because there are partitioning errors. I decided to abandon the use of the installer and just drop to a shell and proceed by hand. I use gpt to create a 512MB efi partition, and then proceed to create a swap one, and 3 more FFS partitions. When I try to use those in the installer, I always reach some errors and can not move forward with the installation of the sets. If I try to use the partitioning tool from the menu I always end up loosing the EFI partition, which I wan't there, no matter if I'm gonna use it or not. After creating the partitions in the console, dkctl shows the wedges properly, I create FS on them with newfs, but in the end, even if I chose to use current partition table, the installer doesn't like it and I can't install NetBSD successfully. Please let me know what I'm missing, as the structure and relationship of gpt/bsd disklabel/wedges is a bit foreign to me, and I know I'm not doing something right. In Linux I would have dropped to a shell, created my partitions with gdisk and/or parted, initialized the raid, or the LVM or just plain filesystems, mounted them and just pointed the installer where to install, however I just don't know how to do that in NetBSD. Please let me know what to do to fix my situation or just point me in a direction of some good reading material, as the wiki is not very helpful. At this point I'm not trying to do an EFI boot, just properly initialize my hard drive with GPT and proceed to a legacy boot. I'll leave the EFI fight for another day. Thanks and keep up the good work!
