Trying to build 8.0 Headless Installation Disk

[Tim Judd]

Replies inserted below

On 1/13/10, Martin McCormick <martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu> wrote:
> 	I started to use the same strategy that worked in 6.x
> but it is not working right now.
>
> 	I obtained8.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso and did:
> mkdir 8.0serial
> tar xf 8.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso
>
> 	This produced a read-write file system that appears sane
> in that it seems to be large enough, but not larger than a
> standard CDROM.
>
> 	The boot directory has loader.conf in it but there is no
> reference to any console.
>
> 	I added the following:
>
> mfsroot_load="YES"
> mfsroot_type="mfs_root"
> mfsroot_name="/boot/mfsroot"
> #add by martin
> console="comconsole,vidconsole"
>
> 	The CDROM burner is on a Linux system so I used tar to
> copy the 8.0serial file system over to the Linux system and then:
>
> mkisofs -l -R -q . |cdrecord -dev=/dev/hdc -


^^^  mkisofs needs to have the boot record
-b boot/cdboot -no-emul-boot


And as another option, you might look at mfsBSD, it runs off mfs (RAM)
disks with sshd being enabled by default.  Once it boots (kernel
starts probing), the cd can be ejected.

>
> 	This produces a CD that looks fine in that you can mount
> it, see all the files, etc.
>
> 	The CD does not boot and the system continues to boot as
> if there was no CD in the drive.
>
> 	I did burn an unmodified image to a CDROM and the system
> did hang, waiting for keyboard input so that ISO image does work
> but I need the serial console to come up on boot as we will be
> running it remotely. This has worked in the past when necessary,
> but it appears something changed between FreeBSD6.3 and 8.0 and
> I must be doing something wrong now.
>
> 	Has anybody gotten an 8.0 CD to come up on the serial
> console?
>
> 	One thing that has changed between 6.3 and 8.0 is that
> the tar application does not get confused. In 6.3, there were a
> couple of files that caused an "out of order" error but the 8.0
> CD produced no errors at all.
>
> 	Thank you for your help.
>
> Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK
> Systems Engineer
> OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group



--Tim