7.3-BETA1 Available... [memstick.img?]

[Garrett Cooper]

On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Daniel O'Connor <doconnor at gsoft.com.au> wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Feb 2010, Ian Smith wrote:
>> On Sun, 31 Jan 2010, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
>>  > On Sun, 31 Jan 2010, Ken Smith wrote:
>>  > > No, no plans afoot for memsticks for the balance of the 7.X
>>  > > releases. The sysinstall support for installing from a USB based
>>  > > disk didn't get MFCed to stable/7.  Even if it was we're already
>>  > > something of a heavyweight on images (both CDs-with-packages and
>>  > > DVD) so my plan all along had been to phase in the memstick
>>  > > image for stable/8 and at the same time drop CDs-with-packages.
>>  >
>>  > FWIW the method I used works on 7.x because sysinstall understands
>>  > how to read the install off a DOS device :)
>>
>> Still to figure out how your method - using Luigi's syslinux boot off
>> a FAT slice on a stick - works when 7's sysinstall can't see USB
>> disks?
>
> 7 _can_ see USB disks just fine, it has nothing to do with the USB
> stack.
>
> The problem was purely that sysinstall did not look at certain
> candidates for source media due to some old assumptions in the code.
> The patches in 8.x  to allow it to install "from USB" just changed it
> to look harder for UFS source media.
>
> IMO FAT32 is more flexible anyway since 99.9% of all USB sticks already
> come formatted using it, and 99.9% of all computers with USB ports can
> read and write it.
>
> FWIW there is a tool that is shipped with some Linux distros which can
> take a CD/DVD image and munge it onto a USB stick. Unfortunately it
> doesn't work on FreeBSD because I can't get the loader to read from the
> USB stick directly which means I need to make an MFS for sysinstall
> which contains the loader, kernel and sysinstall MFS. If such an image
> were shipped as part of the build then this tool could be used by end
> users to convert the ISO image themselves.

Daniel,
    Could you please describe the process to me in more detail (i.e
what tools are used, high-level process req'd, etc)? I am going to be
doing something similar for work [at Ironport] and if I can do it in a
better manner and it would be accepted into the tree, that would be
the option I'd take for resolving this bootable media, for my work as
well as for the community as a whole.
Thanks,
-Garrett