Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 10:55:53 -0500 From: Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton@gmail.com> To: Maude User <maudeuser@yahoo.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Installing from a USB Flash Drive (Was: Newbie needs help setting up rackmount server) Message-ID: <ef10de9a050812085556ee0f19@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <ef10de9a0508111929b7f88f1@mail.gmail.com> References: <ef10de9a0508111646a87c788@mail.gmail.com> <20050811235916.74808.qmail@web31601.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <ef10de9a0508111929b7f88f1@mail.gmail.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On 8/11/05, Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton@gmail.com> wrote: >=20 > I'm personally liking the usb flash drive thingy idea I mentioned > earlier if you have no floppy or cd-rom drives. Not sure if this will > even work btw, never tried it. >=20 > What you would do is download the the 20MB bootonly.iso CD-ROM image > and mound it (this step my not be needed) with mdconfig: > "mdconfig -a -t vnode -f 5.4-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso -u 0" > Use "mount_cd9660 /dev/md0 /mnt" and you can change the config files > on the fake cd for console redirection to serial port, 'echo > "/boot/loader -h" > boot.config', etc. >=20 > Next you would dd the image onto the usb flash drive: > "dd if=3D/dev/md0 of=3D/dev/da0 bs=3D1M" >=20 > Now remove the usb flash drive from your laptop and plug it into the > server, tell the server to boot from the usb flash drive, the > filesystem on the flash drive would be cd9660 and hopefully boot like > a normal CD-ROM. If your flash drive was big enough you could load the > entier disc1.iso cd onto it, what happened to the miniinst.iso that > was only 270MB? I guess you could strip all the packages off the > disc1.iso to make a miniinst.iso disk? >=20 > What do you guys think, would this method work? the only hang up's I > can think of is making your usb flash drive think it's a CD-ROM and if > the FreeBSD install discs will work when it thinks its a hard drive, > da0 for usb storage.... I'll have to try it tomarrow.... >=20 Ok I tried it. I can't trick the computer and the USB flash drive into thinking it's a CD-ROM. Going to try a few other methods now. Another stumbling block I thought of is if your hard drive is scsi it will show up as da1 because the flash drive is da0. Might mess up sysinstall's install and /etc/fstab. Maybe we should come up with an official install method and install media for USB flash drives. 99% of the systems sold today can boot from USB and the things are cheap, I can pickup a 128MB version for $15 and a 1GB version for $60. These devices would also be good for automated installs on embedded and thin client devices that don't have floppy or CD-ROM drives, yes?
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?ef10de9a050812085556ee0f19>