via nano support - booting amd64 from usb

[Gerrit Kühn]

On Mon, 4 May 2009 07:44:54 +0200
Gerrit Kühn <gerrit at weinberg2.de> wrote:

GK> Then I installed 7.2-i386 which booted fine and works with vge.
GK> Right now I'm doing a cross-build to amd64 after having
GK> modified /usr/src/sys/boot/i386/libi386/bootinfo64.c by hand.

This one appears to be harder than I actually thought. As I found
little information about how to upgrade i386->amd64 in-place, I thought
it would be easier to install the new amd64 system on a usb stick
first. Well, I tried several instructions (e.g. Warner's instructions
under
<http://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2007/10/building-bootable-freebsdi386-images.html>
and
<http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/3/20/installing-freebsd-onto-a-usb-stick>)
which all boil down to the same steps more or less. However, I cannot
get my newly installed system to boot from the stick. The bios does not
even list the stick as bootable usb media. It was no problem to put the
cd images on the stick and boot from it for the installation in the
first place (using Dario's conversion script
<http://www.nabble.com/Installing-FreeBSD-from-USB-flash-drive---some-experiments-td22448216.html>).

I have tried everything I could think of to make the new amd64 system
on the usb stick boot - without any success. Does anyone here have an
idea why this thing won't boot?


luna# ll /dev/da4*
crw-r-----  1 root  operator    0,  97 May  5 00:02 /dev/da4
crw-r-----  1 root  operator    0,  98 May  5 00:02 /dev/da4s1
crw-r-----  1 root  operator    0,  99 May  5 00:02 /dev/da4s1a
crw-r-----  1 root  operator    0, 100 May  5 00:02 /dev/da4s1c

luna# fdisk -p da4
# /dev/da4
g c974 h255 s63
p 1 0xa5 63 15647247
a 1

luna# bsdlabel -A da4s1
# /dev/da4s1:
type: SCSI
disk: da5s1
label: 
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 255
sectors/cylinder: 16065
cylinders: 974
sectors/unit: 15659008
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # milliseconds
track-to-track seek: 0  # milliseconds
drivedata: 0 

8 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
  a: 15647231       16    4.2BSD        0     0     0 
  c: 15647247        0    unused        0     0         # "raw" part,
don't edit bsdlabel: partition c doesn't cover the whole unit!
bsdlabel: An incorrect partition c may cause problems for standard
system utilities



Actually it should also be possible to boot into a different disk from
the loader prompt. Somehow I seem to have a bad day, because I cannot
get this to work either. So I do also gratefully accept any hints how
to boot into that system on the usb stick from the loader prompt. lsdev
comes up with 6 disks there (probably the cf card I installed the i386
system on, the usb stick I installed the amd64 system on and 4 further
disks (da0-da3 in the booted i386 system above) I intend to use for data
later - disk0 and disk1 are listed with ffs file systems, so these are
probably the cf card (ad13 in the booted i386 system above) and the usb
stick (da4 in the booted i386 system above)).

Need some sleep now... |-)


cu
  Gerrit