Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 13:46:07 -0600 From: David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> To: tsuraan <tsuraan@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Making a Compact Flash-based installer Message-ID: <20051129194607.GC4935@Grumpy.DynDNS.org> In-Reply-To: <84fb38e30511290839y525e47fdr@mail.gmail.com> References: <84fb38e30511290839y525e47fdr@mail.gmail.com>
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On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 10:39:52AM -0600, tsuraan wrote: > I've been using a custom bootable CD for a while to install a > customized build of FreeBSD on servers, but now I have a unit that has > neither a CD-ROM drive nor any molex connectors at all. It does have > a pair of compact flash drives though. So, what I'd like to do is > transfer the data from my bootable CDs to a compact flash card, so I > can install off that instead. In prior employment we shipped a bunch of "embedded servers" with FreeBSD on CF using Soekris hardware. What I suggest you do is rather than duplicate your *install* CD on CF, simply use another machine to install the desired image directly on the CF. Probably a good place to use "dangerously dedicated" rather than a traditional MSDOS partition table. FreeBSD ain't no write-only Microsoft Windows. The installed image is robust and flexible so its easy to move one runnable image around from one machine to the next. CF media has a limited number of writes before the hidden magic built into the media card starts replacing worn out blocks with spares. Probably not a good idea to have a swap partition on your CF. Also add "noatime" to your filesystems in /etc/fstab and do whatever you can to minimize writing to CF. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@HiWAAY.net ======================================================================== Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.
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