freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 110, Issue 24

as2sb3100 at comcast.net as2sb3100 at comcast.net
Tue Sep 6 07:48:45 PDT 2005


I've installed FreeBSD to a 1gb usb drive, but getting it to boot is really the hard part.  The new dells at my work boot off the USB drive just fine, but the Gateways at my school (that did have a boot from usb option) seem to have a problem with it.  The Gateway BIOS must not have drivers, or something, Im not sure, but the Gateways would boot off my USB harddrive that had freebsd on it.  If your getting to the boot loader though, it should work.  Are you booting from usb, or your hd?  And what kind of errors is it giving you?  I had some problems with it changing the device name, but that was when i was going from one computer to another.  Some computers have different usb devices/drivers and so it changes the device name, I don't know the exact details.  It's been a while since I did this.  When the boot loader trys to load the kernel, and then it trys to mount the filesystem (or the umm, something) it trys to look in da0s1, but it might change to something else.  When yo
 u copied / and /usr over to your usb drive, it also copied settings and stuff (not realy sure).  It might be trying to load the filesystem from da0s1 (mian hd) instead of da1s2 or something wierd like that.  Id try and actually install FreeBSD to your USB drive using a bootable FreeBSD cd.  I was surprised when it detected the USB drive.  You of course don't get the most updated version, but it will probably work a lot better.  Interestingly, Windows 2k will see a usb drive also, but of course it fails like it always does.  Hope this helps, or at least points you in the right direction.  For a better explanation of the booting process read http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/boot.html I'm sure that I messed it all up in the way I explained it.

Eric Stringer


> Message: 4
> Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2005 21:45:24 -0700
> From: Damon Blom <surferdamon at adelphia.net>
> Subject: freebsd on memory card
> To: questions at freebsd.org
> Message-ID: <200509052145.24906.surferdamon at adelphia.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain;  charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Hi
>    presario r3000 amd64 freebsd-current 7.0
>    ad0: 76319MB Hitachi DK23FA-80
>    da0 HP Digital drive 1.00 > Removable direct access SCSI -0 Device
>    dual XP/FreeBSD with easy boot
>    used sysinstall to configure da0 as entire freebsd
>           da0s1a  /tmp      390MB
>           da0s1d  /tmp/usr 600MB
>    used gtar to transfer / to /mnt
>                     transfer /usr to /mnt/usr  (Cheat Sheet)
>    usb bootable (bios) shows 
>         F1 ?              (win)
>         F2 Freebsd
>         F5 Drive 1
>   But will not boot . I did same thing on desktop with a second hard drive
> and it booted fine. Is it because memory card is not really a hard drive?
> Any way to do it ? 
>    Thank's
>       Damon
>   and thank's so much for freebsd (my whole life)
> 
> 
> ------------------------------


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