I was installing FreeBSD on my MacBook Air. When partitioning the disk, the installer told me
This partition scheme requires a boot partition for the disk to be bootable. Would you like to make one now? <Yes/No>
The problem is, I already have an EFI partition on my internal SSD, which presumably serves macOS. Do I need to create a different one for FreeBSD?
I've done some painful experiments on this issue:
- When I chose
No
, FreeBSD becomes unbootable, i.e. "FreeBSD" is simply not shown in rEFInd's menu. When I chose
Yes
, "the FreeBSD installer appears to have created a very bad hybrid MBR on your disk, and this is confusing OS X", and thus my disk got corrupted. Fortunately, after I follow @Rod Smith's instruction (created a new protective MBR to replace the bad hybrid MBR), this problem is solved now, but now my disk have 2 EFI partitions.Now my internal SSD looks like this:
sunqingyaos-MacBook-Air:~ sunqingyao$ diskutil list /dev/disk0 (internal, physical): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0 1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 60.6 GB disk0s2 3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3 4: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s4 5: FreeBSD UFS 53.5 GB disk0s5 6: FreeBSD Swap 6.2 GB disk0s6 7: 83BD6B9D-7F41-11DC-BE0B-001560B84F0F 101.4 KB disk0s7
Also,
sunqingyaos-MacBook-Air:~ sunqingyao$ sudo gpt -r show disk0 Password: start size index contents 0 1 PMBR 1 1 Pri GPT header 2 32 Pri GPT table 34 6 40 409600 1 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B 409640 118284248 2 GPT part - 48465300-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC 118693888 1269536 3 GPT part - 426F6F74-0000-11AA-AA11-00306543ECAC 119963424 409600 4 GPT part - C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B 120373024 104447992 5 GPT part - 516E7CB6-6ECF-11D6-8FF8-00022D09712B 224821016 12156928 6 GPT part - 516E7CB5-6ECF-11D6-8FF8-00022D09712B 236977944 198 7 GPT part - 83BD6B9D-7F41-11DC-BE0B-001560B84F0F 236978142 1 236978143 32 Sec GPT table 236978175 1 Sec GPT header