GPT/MBR and 9.3

[creiss]

Guys, adopting GPT and at the same time dropping MBR is way too soon. Try again in a decade. You have been promoting the use of old hardware for home usage -- now all of a sudden and warning you drop MBR support killing the majority of home appliances?

There is NO benefit at this point for gpt. uEFI can boot mbr and gpt, but not the other way around. And do you guys really have USB Sticks larger than 3tb?

In comparison: Only some distributions nowadays start dropping 32 bit support -- more than a decade after 64 bit has launched. The benefits are clear on this end, but there is no reason to drop mbr at this point.

Please fork/ offer a mbt version/ regress/ rollback.

 

[cyberjock]

Actually, we haven't been promoting the use of old hardware. Read our stickies. We recommend newer hardware, 8GB of RAM minimum, etc. The old project (called FreeNAS, so it is confusing) was rebranded as NAS4Free back in 2011. Even when I started in this project in 2012 I was cautioned to use server-grade recent hardware, so I bought such and have had no problems.

Some people will always be left out when technology marches on. The reality is that my spare desktop hardware from 2008 will boot GPT. So I'm not sure how old your hardware should be expected to work, but 7 years seems to be a pretty good lifespan IMO.

 

[Ericloewe]

GPT is more or less a requirement for future growth. MBR has restricted the FreeNAS boot device to four partitions, which was maxed out. I'm not sure if 9.3 uses extra partitions for anything (guess it doesn't, maybe it even has fewer partitions), but I can imagine scenarios where it's useful to have more partitions.

 

[L]

Yes like they said the fork is nas4free.

 

[hungarianhc]

Hi All,

I've been bitten by this issue as well. Quick clarification... Does it only apply to USB drives? I'm using an older HP Server... If I go buy a 32GB SSD, will I be able to install FreeNAS on the SSD and boot? Or is this issue for any device I boot from?

 

[cyberjock]

This may or may not apply to USB only. It depends on your system and it's BIOS. You'd have to contact your system manufacturer or test it yourself to find out if it will work or not.

 

[Ericloewe]

We've seen all the following scenarios:

• EFI boot works fine for all boot options.
• EFI boot doesn't work for USB drives. Traditional BIOS boot works for all devices.
• EFI boot is nominally supported, works with Windows' frankenboot process, not with FreeBSD.
• EFI boot quietly not available.