Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:41:00 +1030 From: "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Cc: Clifton Royston <cliftonr@lava.net> Subject: Re: Installing FreeBSD from USB flash drive - some experiments Message-ID: <200903111441.01578.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> In-Reply-To: <20090311032557.GA7735@lava.net> References: <20090311032557.GA7735@lava.net>
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--nextPart2923143.l3NFEngUsf Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline On Wednesday 11 March 2009 13:55:58 Clifton Royston wrote: > I think I have found some limitations of the current sysinstall which > currently make it currently difficult to convert a working FreeBSD ISO > to an installable or live-disk flash image. Booting the kernel is > easy. Getting the rest of the way is harder. I have a working USB installer for 7.1 but it is not terribly straightfowar= d. > Background: AFAICT the release ISOs don't currently mount the media > they were booted from (da0a in this case.) Instead they load > boot/mfsroot.gz (compressed memory image) as the root fs, which is fine > and makes good sense, but they don't then mount the boot media anywhere > under it. (My guess is that this was probably originally done to > support the floppy boot case.) Yes, I think so. > So how can you direct it to install from the USB media? > > 1) If you try to select media via the menu options, you can't select > USB specifically, nor specify an arbitrary device as the source > (/dev/da0a in this case), so you can't get the booted medium mounted to > install from, so you can't get the distributions accessible, so install > doesn't work. Picking CD as the media seems to mean specifically an > cd or acd device. =46or some reason the "Install from UFS" thing doesn't let you mount anythi= ng, I=20 think this would be fairly easy to fix. I didn't actually attempt to fix this, instead I split my USB stick in 2. T= he=20 first partition was 2.5Gb FAT32, the last 1.5Gb was UFS. I put the CD image= on=20 there and did boot0cfg etc.. The reason FAT goes first is that otherwise when you put it into a Windows = PC=20 (as I'd like people to be able to do to edit the install.cfg) Windows gets= =20 confused and wants to format the disk.. Putting UFS last gets around this a= nd=20 it still works fine. > 5) "The emergency holographic shell, then?" Yes, you can get into > the emergency holographic shell, with the very limited set of commands > from the mfsroot bin/sbin/stand. However, if you try using the > emergency holographic shell to mount da0a - as far as I can tell, you > can't do so, because there is no mount in mfsboot's stand, only > mount_nfs. (I'm guessing the "mount" operation for acd0 or cd0 is > coded into sysinstall?) The usual mount command of course exists on the > media, but it's on the LiveCD portion which isn't mounted at this > point... Yeah, the lack of mount in /stand on the install disk is a big caveat. I suspect you could go into label and add /dev/da0a (also, argh, DD is bad,= =20 use an MBR) and tell it not to newfs it and then sysinstall will mount it f= or=20 you. =2D-=20 Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C --nextPart2923143.l3NFEngUsf Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name=signature.asc Content-Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQBJtznV5ZPcIHs/zowRAh3AAJ4homUTptJr4xHyYANC9Nqn7rvVkQCfVpuF OYpQjFFSb3qQFzm9cBO1tpY= =TI+q -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --nextPart2923143.l3NFEngUsf--
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