8.2-BETA1 sysinstall: No USB devices found

[Daniel O'Connor]

On 13/12/2010, at 14:06, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> The result: I was able to get things like memtest86+ and DBAN to boot,
> and very specific Linux distributions (with a lot of pain), in addition
> to FreeBSD.  However, FreeBSD would always fail to find the necessary
> installation packages/sources/etc. due to "how" the whole booting
> process above works.  I had to spend a lot of time messing around with
> MEMLINUX and the "map --hook rootnoverify (0xff)" parameters and similar
> whatnots:

For just FreeBSD I have used syslinux to boot an MFS and then have sysinstall read off the USB stick as a hard disk.

I submitted a few patches and they're committed now so you can probably do it out of the box.

The only pain is generating the MFS but that isn't _too_ tricky.

It would be nice if it was generated during the normal 'make release' though (hint hint)

Also, I tried a minimal MFS and then loading the kernel directly from FAT32 using the loader but I could never get it to "see" the FAT32 even though by my reading of the code it should work..

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
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