Can not make a 6.2 ISO image

[doug]

On Fri, 10 Aug 2007, Sergio Lenzi wrote:

> The problem is in the rescue directory of the CD/DVD the directory have hard 
> links that when copied with tar, transforms in full files without the 
> links.... I think the problem is in libarchive.. as the old 5.4 FreeBSD does 
> copy the rescue as expected....
>
> a small script fix the rescue links is: assume that your freebsd directory is 
> in /mnt
>
>
> ==========================
> #!/bin/sh
>
> cd /mnt/rescue
> lista=`ls | grep -v  \\\[`
> for i in $lista
> do
>   ln -f [ $i
> done
> echo done
> ========================
>
> Sergio
>
Sergio:

Thanks - your script works perfectly. I also found a post from Alexander 
Anderson:

   Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 07:03:45 -0500
   From: Alexander Anderson <a.anderson at utoronto.ca>
   To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
   Subject: Re: ISO Image Size Increasing

with a perl script that seems to do what your shell script, which worked 
perfectly, does. Your script reduced the iso size to about 625MB which makes 
things work nicely. I also found a guide to making a custom installation iso: 
http://romana.now.ie/writing/customfreebsdiso.html. This would be a great 
addition to the handbook.

Alexander's post has a clear explanation of the problem:

     "Hmm, the problem is that there is no good way to know that two files
     are hardlinks on a 9660 filesystem.  9660 doesn't have a concept of
     inodes as is common in standard unix filesystems.  Instead, the
     information about the file is stored in the directory entry.  This
     means that the two directory entries pointing to the same data blocks
     may in fact describe two different files (e.g. the may have different
     owner or permission, or they may even differ in size!).

     Currently, the inode number shown by 9660 is just the offset of the
     directory entry of the file relative to the disk/partition, with the
     special case for directories, where we use the start of the directory
     itself, i.e. the offset of the '.' entry.  This way, it's quite easy
     to determine the file attributes given the inode number."

Hence my misunderstanding / confusion.

Thanks to all who replied.