FreeBSD USB Install

[Fbsd1]

Brian McCann wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Brian McCann <bjmccann at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Well this just got a LOT more frustrating and interesting.  I made a
>>> stick following those directions using a new stick...worked fine,
>>> booted off of it...did some work on it...somehow the filesystem got
>>> very corrupted in one of various things I was doing to it (I think it
>>> was when I accidentially unplugged it before running a sync and
>>> umount).  I figured it'd just be easier to start over and build it
>>> again from scratch.  So...I try to newfs it ("newfs -U -L FreeBSDStick
>>> /dev/da1s1a", and newfs fails with "cg 0: bad magic number" .  Now I'm
>>> really getting pissed.  So...I run a dd ("dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1
>>> bs=1m"), and do the whole thing over...here's the console output:
>>>
>>> umm# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 bs=1m
>>> dd: /dev/da1: short write on character device
>>> dd: /dev/da1: end of device
>>> 3830+0 records in
>>> 3829+1 records out
>>> 4016045568 bytes transferred in 4324.380202 secs (928699 bytes/sec)
>>> umm# fdisk -BI /dev/da1
>>> ******* Working on device /dev/da1 *******
>>> fdisk: invalid fdisk partition table found
>>> fdisk: Geom not found: "da1"
>>> umm# bsdlabel -B -w da1s1
>>> umm# newfs -U -L FreeBSDStick /dev/da1s1a
>>> /dev/da1s1a: 3827.9MB (7839640 sectors) block size 16384, fragment size 2048
>>>        using 21 cylinder groups of 183.77MB, 11761 blks, 23552 inodes.
>>>        with soft updates
>>> super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
>>>  160, 376512, 752864, 1129216, 1505568, 1881920, 2258272, 2634624,
>>> 3010976, 3387328, 3763680, 4140032, 4516384, 4892736,
>>>  5269088, 5645440, 6021792, 6398144, 6774496, 7150848, 7527200
>>> cg 0: bad magic number
>>>
>>> So now I'm getting seriously ticked off.  Anyone have any ideas what
>>> the heck could be causing this?  This thumb drive was working fine
>>> with FreeBSD!  I'm trying a dd on a thumb drive w/o specifying a block
>>> size / BS...we'll see what that does...but I'm still open to
>>> suggestions since I'm just about out of ideas.
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>> --Brian
>>>
>>>
>> To the list of things tried...add formatting the USB stick with the
>> HDD Low Level Format Tool
>> (http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2006.04.12-HDD-Low-Level-Format-Tool/).
>>  Still no joy...
>>
> 
> For those following along at home, I found the cause of my problems.
> It apparently all came down to the machine I was making the stick on.
> Any machine that had an Intel SCB2 motherboard in it, would screw it
> up.  I switched to using a different & newer machine, re-did the
> directions at http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/04/13/installing-freebsd-on-usb-stick-episode-2
> , and all my problems with it went away.  YAY!!!
> 
> Thanks to all those who provided input.  Long live FreeBSD!
> --Brian
> 

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