Unable to install FreeBSD from external USB cdrom

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Friday 01 June 2007 04:58, Vivek Khera wrote:
> On May 31, 2007, at 1:49 AM, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> > Thanks so much, now I can have an automated install on a USB stick
> > :)
>
> please, please, please share the recipes to make this.  I would love
> to omit CD rom drives on my future systems as the only thing i ever
> use them for is install.
>
> also, can you run "fixit" mode from your USB stick, too?

I haven't actually done it yet, however I was thinking of making a basic 
FreeSBIE disk but split it into a UFS and a DOS partition. I'd put the 
dist files on the FAT partition as well as a tar ball I splat over the 
disk after install (that contains all the packages etc.. it is much 
faster than pkg_add which is what I used to use, it is also more easily 
tweaked).

The FAT partition would also have an install.cfg which sysinstall could 
read (I have sysinstall patches for this).

The reason for using FAT to store the dist files etc is that it would 
allow people to easily tweak the config and the like (useful in our 
situation probably less so for you)

One thing I'm not sure about is how to run sysinstall after boot. A 
normal install CD uses it as init but I don't think that will work very 
well here since FreeSBIE works differently.

The other approach would be to just splat an install CD onto a flash 
disk, eg..

fdisk -BI /dev/da0
bsdlabel -w -B /dev/da0s1
newfs -b 4096 -f 512 -i 8192 -O1 -U /dev/da0s1
mount /dev/da0s1a /mnt
cd /mnt
tar zxf /dev/acd0
umount /mnt

... actually that won't work because sysinstall doesn't know how to 
mount UFS partitions to read dist files :(

I did look at adding that when I did the patch for FAT partitions but 
it's more complex (I wasn't sure of the canonical way to find them.. 
Easiest would be to look in /dev I guess)

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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