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Date:      Mon, 1 Feb 2010 11:42:44 +1030
From:      "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
To:        Ian Smith <smithi@nimnet.asn.au>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, Ken Smith <kensmith@buffalo.edu>
Subject:   Re: 7.3-BETA1 Available... [memstick.img?]
Message-ID:  <201002011142.46490.doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <20100201040016.B46992@sola.nimnet.asn.au>
References:  <1264828108.4948.18.camel@neo.cse.buffalo.edu> <201001311506.32184.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> <20100201040016.B46992@sola.nimnet.asn.au>

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On Mon, 1 Feb 2010, Ian Smith wrote:
> On Sun, 31 Jan 2010, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
>  > On Sun, 31 Jan 2010, Ken Smith wrote:
>  > > No, no plans afoot for memsticks for the balance of the 7.X
>  > > releases. The sysinstall support for installing from a USB based
>  > > disk didn't get MFCed to stable/7. =C2=A0Even if it was we're already
>  > > something of a heavyweight on images (both CDs-with-packages and
>  > > DVD) so my plan all along had been to phase in the memstick
>  > > image for stable/8 and at the same time drop CDs-with-packages.
>  >
>  > FWIW the method I used works on 7.x because sysinstall understands
>  > how to read the install off a DOS device :)
>
> Still to figure out how your method - using Luigi's syslinux boot off
> a FAT slice on a stick - works when 7's sysinstall can't see USB
> disks?

7 _can_ see USB disks just fine, it has nothing to do with the USB=20
stack.

The problem was purely that sysinstall did not look at certain=20
candidates for source media due to some old assumptions in the code.=20
The patches in 8.x  to allow it to install "from USB" just changed it=20
to look harder for UFS source media.

IMO FAT32 is more flexible anyway since 99.9% of all USB sticks already=20
come formatted using it, and 99.9% of all computers with USB ports can=20
read and write it.

=46WIW there is a tool that is shipped with some Linux distros which can=20
take a CD/DVD image and munge it onto a USB stick. Unfortunately it=20
doesn't work on FreeBSD because I can't get the loader to read from the=20
USB stick directly which means I need to make an MFS for sysinstall=20
which contains the loader, kernel and sysinstall MFS. If such an image=20
were shipped as part of the build then this tool could be used by end=20
users to convert the ISO image themselves.

=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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