boot2 can't boot from USB?

[Jerry McAllister]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 05:30:45PM -0400, Craig Rodrigues wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 11:16:16AM +0100, Fluffles wrote:
> > If so, i may have found some bugs / problems with boot2. Long ago i
> > tried to make a bootable USB pendrive with FreeBSD 6.1 on it. It failed
> > to boot with the message "invalid slice" and i got a prompt like:
> 
> I have worked a lot with getting FreeBSD to boot off of USB devices,
> and have gotten it to work.
> Specifically, I have worked with USB pen drives, and USB CD-ROM drives.
> It *is* possible, but what I have found is the following:
> - on some motherboards, you need to explicitly configure the BIOS
>   to boot off of a USB device (either a disk, a CD-ROM, or a "Zip drive")
> - booting off of USB-CDROM devices seems to be much more reliable than
>   booting off of USB pen drives
> - if you have an "older" motherboard BIOS, say from about 3-4 years ago,
>   booting off of USB devices is more unreliable, than a "newer" motherboard
>   BIOS
> - if I have 5 different models of USB pen drives, each model may behave
>   differently, and may or may not boot.  Same for USB CD-ROM drives,
>   but I've found CD-ROM drives to be more reliable than pen drives.
> 
> So to summarize: 
> - booting off of USB devices seems to be sensitive
>   to your motherboard BIOS, and the firmware written into your USB device.
> - booting off of USB CD-ROM drives seems to be more reliable than booting
>   off of USB pen drives

Just to add to your list, I have been successful booting from
a USB floppy drive.   I don't remember the floppy drive make, but
I have used it on both a Dell Optiplex and a IBM (Lenova) laptop.

////jerry

> 
> There is no logic to this, I've just found this out from trial and error,
> and banging my head a lot.
> 
> -- 
> Craig Rodrigues        
> rodrigc at crodrigues.org
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