After some time spending little spare time on computer related stuff (except gaming, if you would consider this related to computerstuff ;-) ) I feel somewhat the urge to get to know how FreeBSD works, how things are done in FreeBSD from administrator perspective. The interest has arisen after installing some plugins (plex media server, sabnzbd, sickrage,...) on my FreeNAS box.
For those reasons, I decided to wipe Fedora Linux from my HP ProBook 6560b and install PCBSD instead. PCBSD is a desktop operating system based on FreeBSD.
The installation itself is quite straightforward. FreeBSD, and thus PCBSD as well, provide the great ZFS filesystem. ZFS has many advantages like automatic snapshotting, ZFS Replication,...
So after the installation was completed, I restarted the laptop just to see the "Missing Operating System" error message on my screen.
After some Googling about "FreeBSD No Operating System" I found my solution on the following link: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/125608/freebsd-10-does-not-boot-after-clean-install
It seems the bios-boot partition still has to be set active and flagged as boot partition. By following the next instructions my laptop was able to boot PCBSD:
So after the PCBSD installation is actually finished, open a shell and run
gpart show
This should list all hard disk drives with all its partitions. As you can see on the picture taken below on my PCBSD machine, there are 2 drives (ada0 and ada1). Write down the number in front and also take note on what hard drive the bios-boot partition is found. In my case, will need ada0 and partition 1 for the next few commands.
Once the information is gather, the partition must be set active and the bootflag must be set on the partition. This can be achieved by executing the following commands:
gpart set -a active /dev/ada0
gpart set -a bootme -i 1 /dev/ada0
I wrote ada0 and 1 in bold because those values might be different on each system!
After a reboot was initiated, my laptop succesfuly booted into PCBSD, which looked like this:
On to the next issue!
