Asus, for what ever reason, has decided that their UEFI Boot Module on the AM1M-A motherboard is ONLY going to work with normal Windows-like MBRs. Which means that booting from FreeBSD’s GPT partition type is completely unsupported, and Asus has clarified that NO EFFORT to add this functionality (that just about every other UEFI board supports) is not going to happen.
And FreeNAS now requires GPT as the boot standard, as their new module formats the host partitions in ZFS, and the only way to boot a ZFS partition is with GPT.
So, the question now is to find a boot manager that can be loaded on a USB flash disk, and act as a go-between to support the boot from the GPT partition on my SSD. I used one back in the day called Plop, and I’m going to give it a try, but we’ll just have to see. Any other suggestions?
Plop is a no-go. No GPT support, only MBR.
Trying Grub2 on a USB disk, to trigger the GPT on the SSD may be the way to go.
Trying Syslinux now. But for some reason the USB drive won’t boot. Hurgh…
ISOLinux (part of SYSLinux) works.
Turns out that Asus will probably not be getting any further purchases from me. When I suggested to their customer service that Windows now supports GPT for large volumes, after they told me they ONLY SUPPORT WINDOWS, I got a very long pause. Evidently, the agent wasn’t aware of this recent change.
Anyway, I lodged a very large complaint as it seems that most of their modern boards are GPT incompatible as they have written out trust in the UEFI, and the boot process actually looks at each drive to find the boot, rather than just letting the drive itself load it’s own software.
For the record, my other AMD boards all boot from GPT without a hitch… and one of them is an older Asus! They have written themselves out of the equation here, and I’m not happy.
Working with Asus, the tech recommended Clover Bootloader. Easy install to a USB drive, configurable, and works well as an UEFI boot extension!
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cloverefiboot/
Well, after all of this, I finally got an Asus tech support agent to admit that the UEFI on this motherboard was limited to old, standard MBR booting. I am not the first person using the AM1 platform as a low-power server, and there is a list of us complaining about the inability to boot to what essentially is an essential component of EFI, e.g. GUID disk management (GPT is GUID Partition Table; GUID is Globally Unique Identifier).
So, there may be a new BIOS that will let me use this as a modern server platform. But if not there is a workaround.
For the record, Clover is cool, but a little picky and chooses from boot to boot whether or not it wants to see the disk. ISOLinux is far less robust, but it is very easy to build a boot module that does nothing more than boot the disk at 80h. And since it is in a cabinet, the less often I actually have to go back and open it up, the better.
This ties into the SPF server that I had in another thread, who’s video I still haven’t managed to get done. But we’re working OK now so videos will be coming.
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