Did somebody boot old Sony Vaio laptop from FreeBSD memstick successfully?

[Lev Serebryakov]

Hello, Warren.
You wrote 28 января 2014 г., 20:32:35:

>> I'm trying to install FreeBSD 10-R (i386) on old Sony Vaio laptop (it is
>> VGN-SZ340P, Merom generation of Core2, ~2007).
>>
>> It allows to select "USB Hard drive" or "USB Optical Drive" as boot device,
>> but it writes "No operating system" in both cases.
>>
>>  I've checked memstick and found, that it doesn't have MBR (it looks like
>> /dev/da4a). I've added MBR, one slice, mbr bootcode, make this slice
>> active, and dump memstick image to /dev/da4s1. My desktop boots from this
>> memstick without problems, laptop says "No boot code".

WB> On MBR/BSDlabel, a second chunk of bootcode must be written inside the 
WB> BSD partition also.  Nicolas Geniteau just posted this very nice 
WB> procedure for converting a memory stick to MBR/BSDlabel.  I have not 
WB> tried it yet, but it does write that additional bootcode.
WB> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2014-January/255841.html
 I tried this too... It looks like this old Laptop / BIOS wants to see
 special USB Floppy / USB Optical drive device, not generic "umass" one.

-- 
// Black Lion AKA Lev Serebryakov <lev at FreeBSD.org>