FreeBSD USB Install

Brian McCann bjmccann at gmail.com
Fri Jan 9 07:09:12 PST 2009


On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 4:30 AM, chris.scott <krad at snaffler.net> wrote:
> if your still stuck i can give you a dd of my usb image that definitely
> works
> if it still doesnt work for you you will know its a hardware issue and not
> your building skills 8)
>
> Brian McCann wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Chris Scott <chris.scott at uk.tiscali.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Ditch sysinstall and follow this
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/04/13/installing-freebsd-on-usb-
>>> stick-episode-2
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> glabel (the -L one newfs) is your friend, as it will help you avoid the
>>> situation when you get boot failures when you try to boot off ur usb
>>> disk on a machine that has scsi drives (da0 wont be the usb drive)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Firing that up now...I'll post the results.  I tried this some time
>> ago and it wouldn't work...but that could have been me doing something
>> wrong or the PC didn't support booting from USB.
>>
>> Thanks, I'll let ya know!
>> --Brian
>>
>>
>
>

Well this just got a LOT more frustrating and interesting.  I made a
stick following those directions using a new stick...worked fine,
booted off of it...did some work on it...somehow the filesystem got
very corrupted in one of various things I was doing to it (I think it
was when I accidentially unplugged it before running a sync and
umount).  I figured it'd just be easier to start over and build it
again from scratch.  So...I try to newfs it ("newfs -U -L FreeBSDStick
/dev/da1s1a", and newfs fails with "cg 0: bad magic number" .  Now I'm
really getting pissed.  So...I run a dd ("dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1
bs=1m"), and do the whole thing over...here's the console output:

umm# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 bs=1m
dd: /dev/da1: short write on character device
dd: /dev/da1: end of device
3830+0 records in
3829+1 records out
4016045568 bytes transferred in 4324.380202 secs (928699 bytes/sec)
umm# fdisk -BI /dev/da1
******* Working on device /dev/da1 *******
fdisk: invalid fdisk partition table found
fdisk: Geom not found: "da1"
umm# bsdlabel -B -w da1s1
umm# newfs -U -L FreeBSDStick /dev/da1s1a
/dev/da1s1a: 3827.9MB (7839640 sectors) block size 16384, fragment size 2048
        using 21 cylinder groups of 183.77MB, 11761 blks, 23552 inodes.
        with soft updates
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
 160, 376512, 752864, 1129216, 1505568, 1881920, 2258272, 2634624,
3010976, 3387328, 3763680, 4140032, 4516384, 4892736,
 5269088, 5645440, 6021792, 6398144, 6774496, 7150848, 7527200
cg 0: bad magic number

So now I'm getting seriously ticked off.  Anyone have any ideas what
the heck could be causing this?  This thumb drive was working fine
with FreeBSD!  I'm trying a dd on a thumb drive w/o specifying a block
size / BS...we'll see what that does...but I'm still open to
suggestions since I'm just about out of ideas.

Thanks!
--Brian



-- 
_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_-=-_
Brian McCann

"I don't have to take this abuse from you -- I've got hundreds of
people waiting to abuse me."
                -- Bill Murray, "Ghostbusters"


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