From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Mar 11 04:11:05 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C89F4106566C for ; Wed, 11 Mar 2009 04:11:05 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from doconnor@gsoft.com.au) Received: from cain.gsoft.com.au (cain.gsoft.com.au [203.31.81.10]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 439408FC17 for ; Wed, 11 Mar 2009 04:11:04 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from doconnor@gsoft.com.au) Received: from inchoate.localnet (Inchoate.gsoft.com.au [203.31.81.30]) (authenticated bits=0) by cain.gsoft.com.au (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id n2B4B3KB017619 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NO); Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:41:03 +1030 (CST) (envelope-from doconnor@gsoft.com.au) From: "Daniel O'Connor" To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:41:00 +1030 User-Agent: KMail/1.10.4 (Linux/2.6.27-11-generic; KDE/4.1.4; i686; ; ) References: <20090311032557.GA7735@lava.net> In-Reply-To: <20090311032557.GA7735@lava.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; boundary="nextPart2923143.l3NFEngUsf"; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; micalg=pgp-sha1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <200903111441.01578.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> X-Spam-Score: -3.977 () ALL_TRUSTED,BAYES_00 X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.63 on 203.31.81.10 Cc: Clifton Royston Subject: Re: Installing FreeBSD from USB flash drive - some experiments X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 04:11:06 -0000 --nextPart2923143.l3NFEngUsf Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline On Wednesday 11 March 2009 13:55:58 Clifton Royston wrote: > I think I have found some limitations of the current sysinstall which > currently make it currently difficult to convert a working FreeBSD ISO > to an installable or live-disk flash image. Booting the kernel is > easy. Getting the rest of the way is harder. I have a working USB installer for 7.1 but it is not terribly straightfowar= d. > Background: AFAICT the release ISOs don't currently mount the media > they were booted from (da0a in this case.) Instead they load > boot/mfsroot.gz (compressed memory image) as the root fs, which is fine > and makes good sense, but they don't then mount the boot media anywhere > under it. (My guess is that this was probably originally done to > support the floppy boot case.) Yes, I think so. > So how can you direct it to install from the USB media? > > 1) If you try to select media via the menu options, you can't select > USB specifically, nor specify an arbitrary device as the source > (/dev/da0a in this case), so you can't get the booted medium mounted to > install from, so you can't get the distributions accessible, so install > doesn't work. Picking CD as the media seems to mean specifically an > cd or acd device. =46or some reason the "Install from UFS" thing doesn't let you mount anythi= ng, I=20 think this would be fairly easy to fix. I didn't actually attempt to fix this, instead I split my USB stick in 2. T= he=20 first partition was 2.5Gb FAT32, the last 1.5Gb was UFS. I put the CD image= on=20 there and did boot0cfg etc.. The reason FAT goes first is that otherwise when you put it into a Windows = PC=20 (as I'd like people to be able to do to edit the install.cfg) Windows gets= =20 confused and wants to format the disk.. Putting UFS last gets around this a= nd=20 it still works fine. > 5) "The emergency holographic shell, then?" Yes, you can get into > the emergency holographic shell, with the very limited set of commands > from the mfsroot bin/sbin/stand. However, if you try using the > emergency holographic shell to mount da0a - as far as I can tell, you > can't do so, because there is no mount in mfsboot's stand, only > mount_nfs. (I'm guessing the "mount" operation for acd0 or cd0 is > coded into sysinstall?) The usual mount command of course exists on the > media, but it's on the LiveCD portion which isn't mounted at this > point... Yeah, the lack of mount in /stand on the install disk is a big caveat. I suspect you could go into label and add /dev/da0a (also, argh, DD is bad,= =20 use an MBR) and tell it not to newfs it and then sysinstall will mount it f= or=20 you. =2D-=20 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." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C --nextPart2923143.l3NFEngUsf Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name=signature.asc Content-Description: This is a digitally signed message part. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQBJtznV5ZPcIHs/zowRAh3AAJ4homUTptJr4xHyYANC9Nqn7rvVkQCfVpuF OYpQjFFSb3qQFzm9cBO1tpY= =TI+q -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --nextPart2923143.l3NFEngUsf--