A few days ago I bought a Dell inspiron 5593 laptop with Nvidia MX-230, a 10 generation i5 and Win10 installed.
(I am no longer interested in Win10, Dell Assistant and all that. I want to delete everything.)
All this is just to say, I can’t install Nomad or FBSD.
I have tried everything possible and there is no way, from reinstalling win10, and that way I thought I could install the BSD. I also shrunk the C: partition and disabled Security Boot, I couldn’t either.
Conclusion, I always get the installer, both Nomad/FBSD only as read and not as write, that is, I can always install on the USB/Pendrive, but not on the laptop disk. That is, it doesn’t let me see the hard disk partitions, it only takes the usb disk to install/write on it.
To better understand what I want to explain, since the language barrier sometimes prevents me from doing so, I leave a screenshot so that you can see better what happens when you want to install BSD on the hard disk and not on the usb/pendrive.
I found that to install the 32bit version on one of my laptops, that I had to create a new boot sector (& partition/slice) before NomadBSD would ‘see’ my hard drive - note that doing so will overwrite what is on your hard drive - so think carefully before doing this!
It may, or may not work for your computer - your decision.
Let’s see, if I got your message, create a new boot sector before Nomad sees my hard drive partitions.
Yes, this can be done, because I have seen it in the Bios/UEFI (does not support Legacy, unfortunately …) of the laptop, also this sector does not carry a volume of megabytes, it is only an order, is it?
I’m used to using Linux more than BSD, & my system was BIOS, I just gave it a new MBR, partitioned the drive, then Nomad installed.
UEFI uses GPT, so I guess you will need to figure out how to set up your disk for it, I only have 2 UEFI machines, one of which I used as a normal UEFI, which worked straight off, the other I installed as MBR, fiddled with the boot option somehow, can’t remember exactly what.
By the way, you should use sudo fdisk /dev/ad0 I think.
Sorry I have to post pictures, I don’t have a nomad connection, the card in this machine is a Qualcomm and the driver is not there yet.
I inserted a Nisuta → rtwn0 wifi dongle and I can’t connect …
From your post, your disk is actually /dev/da0 - that is usually a USB designation - but now fdisk should work.
Re the wifi, it needs to be present when booting up, & the system should load the required driver software; then you need to configure it to your network.
For some reason, your HDD/SSD/NVME is not supported. There nothing we could do about it. The devs on the FreeBSD ML might be interested. What do dmesg | egrep -i 'nvme|nvd|ada|da' and pciconf -lv | grep -B3 storage say?
If you have access to them, it would be very important for me and I would be very grateful.
It is a nice challenge for those who are into these subjects, a bit complicated for people like me (self-taught, that’s all.)
If, as you can see, nvme is not supported, I will exchange it for a regular ssd disk, as I am NOT interested in warranty or anything like that.
From your post, your disk is actually /dev/da0 - that is usually a USB designation - but now fdisk should work.
fdisk doesn’t work here and I don’t know why.
Re the wifi, it needs to be present when booting up, & the system should load the required driver software; then you need to configure it to your network.
Regarding the connection, it doesn’t take the Qualcom card.
Well, this laptop has the possibility to install Ubuntu and so I did. (less Win, always better :))
I installed it with experimental ZFS, according to the installation guide.
Modelo: SanDisk Cruzer Blade (scsi)
Disco /dev/sda: 30,8GB
Tamaño de sector (lógico/físico): 512B/512B
Tabla de particiones: msdos
Indicadores de disco:
Numero Inicio Fin Tamaño Tipo Sistema de archivos Banderas
1 1049kB 43,0MB 41,9MB primary fat32 esp
2 43,0MB 3758MB 3715MB primary arranque
3 3758MB 30,8GB 27,0GB primary
Ironically, this is the beauty of NomadBSD which is primarily designed for usb-stick booting and operation!
I understand the desire to install to an internal hdd / nvme for convenience, but that is what makes NomadBSD so great - you can safely avoid all that - even unrecognized or broken hard drives, or all that multibooting partitioning problems that come from the “hard drive mentality”.
NomadBSD makes a great way to turn modern or older hardware to use that may have broken / dead internal drives by being designed primarily for usb-stick use. The devs did all the hard work for us by making it uber-simple to install and run from them.
Also makes it easier / cheaper for a new enthusiast to buy “bare-bones” computers that only need some ram, and no hard drive or knowledge about them necessary to get up and running. One may never need open the case!
I get it though - might as well put your internal drive to use. Most often, the simplest thing to do is to simply format your internal drive as extra storage and not be bootable, and let NomadBSD running from a stick run the show.
