Installing from USB Flash Drive

[Ross Penner]

On 8/1/07, Reid Linnemann < lreid at cs.okstate.edu> wrote:
>
> Written by Ross Penner on 08/01/07 13:34>>
> > Hi everybody,
> >
> > I'm trying to install a system on a machine that doesn't have an optical
> > drive. I plan on using a USB flash drive to do the job and found a
> > messages from hackers at freebsd.org
> > (http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org/msg55434.html )
> > about just such a thing. The script provided converts the CD image into
> > one suitable for a flashmemory stick. I used  and coverted it without
> > issue. The instructions say to use dd to prepare the flash drive so
> > executed
> > #dd if=flashbsd.iso of=/dev/da0
> > I'm not entirely confident that that was the correct procedure, as I'm
> > quite unfamilar with dd. Unfortunetly, I can't seem to get the drive to
> > boot. I can mount the filesystem so it seems that prepareing the drive
> > was succesful. I'm using a via chipset and yes, the bios is set to boot
> > from USB-FDD. I used the 6.2 boot only image.
> >
> > Thanks for any insight you can provide me.
> >
> > Ross
> >
>
> That seems correct to me. You may want to 'bsdlabel -B /dev/da0' after
> writing the ufs image to it. The script you referenced does this to the
> image before you write it to the flash drive, so the boot code should
> already be there... but it appears to have gotten lost.
>

Perhaps it never worked in the first place?

rosbot# bsdlabel -B /dev/da0
bsdlabel: partition c doesn't cover the whole unit!
bsdlabel: An incorrect partition c may cause problems for standard system
utilities

I didn't do anything to the drive before dd'ing to it. Should have it been
prepared somehow? I assumed dd would
take care of partitions. There is a da0a and a da0c in /dev/ .