Installing from USB Flash Drive

[Reid Linnemann]

Written by Ross Penner on 08/01/07 13:34>>
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I'm trying to install a system on a machine that doesn't have an optical 
> drive. I plan on using a USB flash drive to do the job and found a 
> messages from hackers at freebsd.org 
> (http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org/msg55434.html) 
> about just such a thing. The script provided converts the CD image into 
> one suitable for a flashmemory stick. I used  and coverted it without 
> issue. The instructions say to use dd to prepare the flash drive so 
> executed
> #dd if=flashbsd.iso of=/dev/da0
> I'm not entirely confident that that was the correct procedure, as I'm 
> quite unfamilar with dd. Unfortunetly, I can't seem to get the drive to 
> boot. I can mount the filesystem so it seems that prepareing the drive 
> was succesful. I'm using a via chipset and yes, the bios is set to boot 
> from USB-FDD. I used the 6.2 boot only image.
> 
> Thanks for any insight you can provide me.
> 
> Ross
> 

That seems correct to me. You may want to 'bsdlabel -B /dev/da0' after 
writing the ufs image to it. The script you referenced does this to the 
image before you write it to the flash drive, so the boot code should 
already be there... but it appears to have gotten lost.