FreeBSD USB Install

[Brian McCann]

>
> 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
>
>

To the list of things tried...add formatting the USB stick with the
HDD Low Level Format Tool
(http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2006.04.12-HDD-Low-Level-Format-Tool/).
 Still no joy...

--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"