FreeBSD USB Install

[Ricardo Jesus]

Steve Bertrand wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> 
I've installed 7.0 on an USB IDE drive last week. At the time the USB 
drive had a Linux distro on it which I destroyed, place the install CD 
on the CD drive, selected boot from USB, the drive showed up on 
sysinstall, and performed a pretty standard FreeBSD install.

Regards.