8.2-BETA1 sysinstall: No USB devices found

[Ian Smith]

On Sun, 12 Dec 2010, Michael Voorhis wrote:
 > On 12/12/2010 11:28 AM, Brandon Gooch wrote:
 > > How difficult would it be for the installer to automatically re-scan
 > > for devices when USB is selected as install or Fix-it media?
 > 
 > Ditto this.  I do all my OS installs via a USB CD reader and it took me a
 > little while to come up with the rescan-fix.

This one goes back a while; I got involved in a discusion in questions@ 
where Randi provided a fair bit of info on some of the issues here:
 Re: 8.0-RELEASE-i386-memstick fixit - No USB devices found!
 http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2009-December/208977.html

 > I don't order rack servers with optical disk readers that I'll only be using
 > once to install the OS, so all the stuff I build is installed from USB disc
 > readers.  My initial response was "how can we not know there's a CD reader
 > when I just booted and read the installer from it."

Ah, perhaps it's not just older kit and/or some types of USB stick that 
have this issue then ..

 > One of the 1st things sysinstall does is run a device scan deviceGetAll(),
 > but that misses the USB device, apparently.  The deviceRescan() calls the
 > same function, but preceeds it with deviceReset().
 > 
 > All this stuff is in src/usr.sbin/sysinstall/devices.c.  I'm not smart enough
 > to make my own install disks right now; what would happen if the reset were
 > inserted in front of the rescan (in main.c) at the beginning of sysinstall
 > execution?  That seems to be the only difference between the initial scan and
 > the "option" scan.

There may be an issue with doing that too: it seems that reset also 
resets other things, in my case losing the disk slicing, labelling and 
choice of distributions that had already been done:
 Re: Installing 8.1-RELEASE from the memstick
 http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2010-August/219690.html

I still don't undersand why memstick images need to be in DD mode (daXa) 
rather than allowing being properly sliced (daXsY), unless it's just the 
clash with sliced da devices indicating 'real' SCSI disks in devices.c?

I'd love to be able to put amd64 and i386 installers, plus say the 
packages from the DVD, plus somewhere to save dmesgs, on one stick.

cheers, Ian