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Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 09:32:35 -0700 (MST)
From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>
To: Lev Serebryakov <lev@FreeBSD.org>
Subject: Re: Did somebody boot old Sony Vaio laptop from FreeBSD memstick
 successfully?
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On Tue, 28 Jan 2014, Lev Serebryakov wrote:

> Hello, All.
>
> I'm trying to install FreeBSD 10-R (i386) on old Sony Vaio laptop (it is
> VGN-SZ340P, Merom generation of Core2, ~2007).
>
> It allows to select "USB Hard drive" or "USB Optical Drive" as boot device,
> but it writes "No operating system" in both cases.
>
>  I've checked memstick and found, that it doesn't have MBR (it looks like
> /dev/da4a). I've added MBR, one slice, mbr bootcode, make this slice
> active, and dump memstick image to /dev/da4s1. My desktop boots from this
> memstick without problems, laptop says "No boot code".

On MBR/BSDlabel, a second chunk of bootcode must be written inside the 
BSD partition also.  Nicolas Geniteau just posted this very nice 
procedure for converting a memory stick to MBR/BSDlabel.  I have not 
tried it yet, but it does write that additional bootcode.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2014-January/255841.html