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Date:      Fri, 1 Jun 2007 14:52:02 +0930
From:      "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
To:        Vivek Khera <vivek@khera.org>
Cc:        FreeBSD Stable List <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Unable to install FreeBSD from external USB cdrom
Message-ID:  <200706011452.17035.doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <35B2A5CB-FDDE-47E4-A73E-8D93D6D157C4@khera.org>
References:  <3aaaa3a0705170830g46487cc7occc8a51b82a9118b@mail.gmail.com> <200705311519.18942.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> <35B2A5CB-FDDE-47E4-A73E-8D93D6D157C4@khera.org>

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On Friday 01 June 2007 04:58, Vivek Khera wrote:
> On May 31, 2007, at 1:49 AM, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> > Thanks so much, now I can have an automated install on a USB stick
> > :)
>
> please, please, please share the recipes to make this.  I would love
> to omit CD rom drives on my future systems as the only thing i ever
> use them for is install.
>
> also, can you run "fixit" mode from your USB stick, too?

I haven't actually done it yet, however I was thinking of making a basic=20
=46reeSBIE disk but split it into a UFS and a DOS partition. I'd put the=20
dist files on the FAT partition as well as a tar ball I splat over the=20
disk after install (that contains all the packages etc.. it is much=20
faster than pkg_add which is what I used to use, it is also more easily=20
tweaked).

The FAT partition would also have an install.cfg which sysinstall could=20
read (I have sysinstall patches for this).

The reason for using FAT to store the dist files etc is that it would=20
allow people to easily tweak the config and the like (useful in our=20
situation probably less so for you)

One thing I'm not sure about is how to run sysinstall after boot. A=20
normal install CD uses it as init but I don't think that will work very=20
well here since FreeSBIE works differently.

The other approach would be to just splat an install CD onto a flash=20
disk, eg..

fdisk -BI /dev/da0
bsdlabel -w -B /dev/da0s1
newfs -b 4096 -f 512 -i 8192 -O1 -U /dev/da0s1
mount /dev/da0s1a /mnt
cd /mnt
tar zxf /dev/acd0
umount /mnt

=2E.. actually that won't work because sysinstall doesn't know how to=20
mount UFS partitions to read dist files :(

I did look at adding that when I did the patch for FAT partitions but=20
it's more complex (I wasn't sure of the canonical way to find them..=20
Easiest would be to look in /dev I guess)

=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

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