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Old 12th June 2008
s25 s25 is offline
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Default Boot freeBSD from USB drive?

Thanks to Carpetsmoker for telling me about this great place.
To begin my apologies if this is not meant to be in here. I was unsure where this would fit.

What I am trying to do is dual boot my computer with freeBSD and Windows. I want the Windows boot loader to be there for it all to work as standard and only to boot into freeBSD when my usbkey is in the computer. I can do the partitioning and all that however I am stumbling at this bit of getting it to boot freeBSD from a usb-key, I don't want my filesystem on the usb key I only want it to boot from a USB key. I have looked into boot0config but donot see how I can do it.
I tried the following after copying /boot /mnt/usb(/dev/da0):
fdisk -B -b /boot/boot0 /dev/da0

I also tried this:

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mount /dev/da0s1 /mnt/usb
mkdir /mnt/usb/boot
cd /boot
cp -Rpv * /mnt/usb/boot
boot0cfg -B -s 1 -t -v 182 /dev/da0

So now when I select FreeBSD when I boot by usb I get some BTX Error and the screen scrolls so fast that I cannot make out what is being meant however it does look like numbers. Any ideas?

I would be really grateful if anyone can guide me in this.

Thanks allot.

Last edited by s25; 12th June 2008 at 08:39 PM.
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Old 12th June 2008
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ua549 ua549 is offline
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I'm a Windows guy and a total newbie with FreeBSD/Unix like operating systems. On my notebook PC all I did was boot from FBSD CD #1 and direct the installer to use the entire USB drive. In the BIOS I put the USB drive ahead of the hard drive in the boot sequence. I did not touch the hard drive or its MBR; it remains 100% Vista. When I want to boot FreeBSD, all I do is insert the USB drive otherwise Vista boots. It is all automatic.
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Old 12th June 2008
s25 s25 is offline
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That is now what I asked however. I only want enough info to boot into the hardrive for the following reasons first of all is that constant read/writes may kill the usb stick and I fear a serious decrease in speed.

What is the speed stability like on the system?

Thanks
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Old 12th June 2008
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ua549 ua549 is offline
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You can set the FreeBSD file system other than root to run on a free partition on the hard drive. It is part of the initial installation process.

Running from USB is quite slow, but is OK for certain tasks that don't require much disk i/o.
I use it for testing configuration files for the main BSD desktop machine I'm trying to get working (so far without much success).
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Old 13th June 2008
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It's not something I have done either, but there are a couple of ways. One is to install to the USB key, as ua549 suggested. A simpler way would be to use boot0cfg(8) to add the FreeBSD boot manager to the USB key. That boot manager would then allow you to select the FreeBSD slice to boot from. Search for boot0cfg on the forum for another few threads where we have recently discussed this utility. Also read the man page linked earlier in this post for more information.

Edit: OK, I just read your post properly. You don't need the /boot folder - you should have the root partition on the hard drive. Then when the USB key brings up the boot manager, select the freeBSD partition. Unless you put the full root partition on the USB drive, attempting to boot from it will not work.

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Last edited by robbak; 13th June 2008 at 04:43 AM.
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Old 13th June 2008
s25 s25 is offline
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Ok I do that I removed the /boot from the usb key and it is still fialing on me, I get to the select freeBSD screen and then when I select freeBSD I just get lots of scrolling numbers and text going so fast I cannot read it!
This is the command I used.
boot0cfg -B -s 1 -v /dev/da0

I am hoping that tells the system that there is a bootloader there and then boot loader tells them to go ahead as normal. However it does not seem to be working quite like that.... As you heard the problems above.

Any ideas? I am doing lots of reading up on boot0cfg but cannot seem to be able to get it right. I am probably missing something simple..
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Old 13th June 2008
s25 s25 is offline
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fdisk -B -b mbr da0s1 I tried that and I get a BTX Halted error with lots of numbers and text above it...

All help is welcome I hope it is not bad to double post here, Just on different unrelated attempts to the one above I feel it is often better to add it like this.

Thanks again guys.
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Old 14th June 2008
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Just thought of it: no, it will not work with the FreeBSD boot manager. No doubt other boot managers will be able to do this, but the freeBSD one is too simple (by design, by the way: It is that way so it will fit entirely inside the boot sector.)

With multiple drives, the FreeBSD boot manager simply looks for other boot managers, and gives you the option of handing over to that one. So you will be presented with any bootable slices on the current disk, plus any other disks with bootable entries.

You will have to take a look at some other boot managers (eg grub). These ones are more complex than the freebsd one, and probably have the smarts to look inside other drives for bootable slices.
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Old 14th June 2008
s25 s25 is offline
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Thanks allot ! I will keep looking!
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Old 17th June 2008
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Try grub. I am fairly sure you can load that on a usb stick. Google around, I know there are tutorials about.
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