On 8/11/05, Nikolas Britton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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. > > 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. > > Next you would dd the image onto the usb flash drive: > "dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/da0 bs=1M" > > 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? > > 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.... >
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? _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"