FreeBSD USB Install
Steve Bertrand
steve at ibctech.ca
Wed Jan 7 07:01:32 PST 2009
Matthias Apitz wrote:
> El día Wednesday, January 07, 2009 a las 03:17:02PM +0100, Polytropon escribió:
>
>> On Wed, 7 Jan 2009 08:25:45 -0500, "Brian McCann" <bjmccann at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi all. I'm trying to install FreeBSD 7.1 off the CD to a USB thumb
>>> drive, but every time I try it fails. sysinstall says "Unable to make
>>> new root filesystem on /dev/da0s1a1. Command returned status 38".
>>> When I switch to the debug console, I get "cg 0: bad magic number".
>>> This thumb drive was being used on my Windows machine previously, then
>>> I re-formatted it as UFS to use it on a FreeBSD machine...so I know
>>> the thumb drive itself works. Can someone shed some light on this
>>> problem?
>> I could only suggest to eliminate all slices and partitions on the
>> thumb drive (such as it was a new "disk" right from the factory)
>> and let sysinstall put slice and partitions onto it.
>
> The problem is that 'from the factory' sometimnes they come already Windows-like
> formated; I've wiped out all with:
>
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 bs=1m
>
> (double check that /dev/da0 is really the device you want to clean)
sysinstall will provide you an option to erase any existing 'partitions'
that exist on the drive during install, so the 'dd' is redundant.
I've never installed directly to a thumbdrive before. Normally I'd
install to a hard disk, pear it down, and then effectively copy the
system to the thumb drive manually. I end up with a system as such (so I
don't need a hard disk):
router# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/da0a 939M 410M 454M 47% /
devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev
/dev/md0 31M 20K 28M 0% /tmp
/dev/md1 15M 36K 14M 0% /var/run
/dev/md2 31M 318K 28M 1% /var/log
/tmp 31M 20K 28M 0% /var/tmp
That said, installing to a USB disk through sysinstall should
technically (AFAIK) be no different than installing to a standard SCSI
hard disk (da0).
What options are you supplying when you reach the 'FDISK Partition
Editor' screen?
Also, if you are installing the system via sysinstall that is running on
an already installed FreeBSD, you must use the 'w' option before 'q'.
Quit within the disk editor while running under FreeBSD does not imply
'write'. (This being opposed to booting from a CD to install).
Steve
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