Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2006 20:03:56 -0700 From: "Steve Franks" <stevefranks@ieee.org> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: installing from a harddisk prepared in a functional system Message-ID: <539c60b90612051903q77aa21d0id5c08b2b2c8d10fd@mail.gmail.com>
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How does one make a 'boot' disk - be it cdrom, harddrive or flash (presuming your bios will boot from all those devices, of course)? 1.The handbook specifies you need to minimally copy the /bin folder to the destination. 2. Obviously you want a valid ufs2 partition. 3. I've repeatedly tried setting the 'bootable' option in fdisk, and the 'A' appears next to the slice, but everytime I reboot it dissappears, even after a 'W' command, so I'm going to try to get this to go without using sysinstall by a manual copy, if I can. 4. Windows partitions need some special files, i.e. ntldr, at a special location on the boot partiton - equivalent in bsd? Or does the loader just look for /bin and load the kernel from there? 5. bootloader seems to work when I put the disk in the new computer - get F1 and F2, but nothing else happens. Basically I'm trying to make an 'image' - put a fresh disk in my working system, format it, make it boot, at least to sysinstall, so I can put it in my other system that has no floppy or cdrom to install from, and get things rolling over the network card. I was thinking I could just do this with a single partition on the target disk, like the install cdrom's do. I want to turn a harddisk into an install cdrom, and then have it install to itself, a dangerous idea, no doubt, but it appears that it could work, I just can't get the new disk to boot in the new system. Thanks, Steve -- Steve Franks, KE7BTE Staff Engineer La Palma Devices, LLC http://www.lapalmadevices.com (520) 312-0089
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