[9front] Unwanted EFI partition during installation

[9front] Unwanted EFI partition during installation

[Rocky Hotas]

Hello!
I am completely new to 9front and was trying to install it on an old
32 bit laptop. After downloading `9front-8392.16c5ead832f2.386.iso',
I launched the setup using the instructions in

 <http://fqa.9front.org/fqa4.html>

In the `partdisk' step, after erasing all the existing partitions on
the hard disk, I pressed `w' and `q' and now the disk has:

esp "EFI System Partition" (550.00 MB)
plan9 "Plan 9"

After successfully completing the installation, the OS is not detected
by the laptop, which of course is not able to boot with EFI.

I repeated the installation hoping that some option to avoid EFI was
present, but I didn't manage to find it and I can no more find this
prompt:

Shall we create a blank EFI partition table (GPT)
or install traditional DOS partition table (MBR)?

How to create a traditional MBR non-EFI partition table and how to make
it bootable?

Thank you!

Rocky

Re: [9front] Unwanted EFI partition during installation

[sirjofri]

05.07.2021 11:08:22 Rocky Hotas <rockyhotas@post.com>:
> How to create a traditional MBR non-EFI partition table and how to make
> it bootable?

Hello and welcome,

I had this issue and fixed it by looking into the prepdisk/partdisk files 
in /bin/inst. There is a command for manually formatting the disk as mbr. 
After that you can run the whole installation process and the disk should 
be detected as mbr.

It should also be possible to completely ream/null the disk (some vps 
providers have an option for that). Then you should get the prompt again.

Good luck

sirjofri

Re: [9front] Unwanted EFI partition during installation

[hiro]

write some megabyte of nulls both to the beginning and the end of the
disk to get rid of the backed up gpt records, too

On 7/5/21, sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9front@sirjofri.de> wrote:
>
> 05.07.2021 11:08:22 Rocky Hotas <rockyhotas@post.com>:
>> How to create a traditional MBR non-EFI partition table and how to make
>> it bootable?
>
> Hello and welcome,
>
> I had this issue and fixed it by looking into the prepdisk/partdisk files
> in /bin/inst. There is a command for manually formatting the disk as mbr.
> After that you can run the whole installation process and the disk should
> be detected as mbr.
>
> It should also be possible to completely ream/null the disk (some vps
> providers have an option for that). Then you should get the prompt again.
>
> Good luck
>
> sirjofri
>