Booting Install .iso from Hard Disk?

[Angus77]

Hi! I'm wanting to try out FreeBSD, but the computer I have available to try it out on has no network connection and an unreliable CD-ROM (it just gives up here and there). It's an old clunker and I have no intention of actually buying any new hardware for it, no matter how cheap (I'd rather buy me a nice lunch!) Oh, and the BIOS doesn't allow me to USB boot.

I was able to install Ubuntu Hardy, and then Intrepid, to the thing following these instructions:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromLinux

which allows me to put the contents of the installation medium on my hard drive and boot & install from there.

I'd love to be able to do the same thing with FreeBSD, but I've spent the day screwing around and can't figure it out (total lack of experience with BSD would be a major contributing factor, I assume). It was easy enough with Linux, so I assume it can be done with FreeBSD...right?

[bsddaemon]

Please take a look at GAG. I havent had a chance to test it by myself, but as I know, it is capable to do what you are after

You can always take the HDD out (adapter needed if it is laptop HDD), install FreeBSD from other machines then plug back in (make sure fstab entries are correct)

[Angus77]

Thanks. I'll give them a try (although I'm gonna be away from that computer for a couple days).

Although I still get the feeling there _must_ be some way to boot the install disk off the hard disk...

[Business_Woman]

Have you looked at mdconfig ?

[Angus77]

I've googled it, but I don't understand how this will help...?

[Business_Woman]

Sorry, my bad. I read your post rather hasty. No, you can't boot from an ISO as far as i know

[richardpl]

I'd love to be able to do the same thing with FreeBSD, but I've spent the day screwing around and can't figure it out (total lack of experience with BSD would be a major contributing factor, I assume). It was easy enough with Linux, so I assume it can be done with FreeBSD...right?

Same rules from that howto apply to FreeBSD just instead of ext3 partition you need to format ufs partition, and copy files from CD.

But it is much better/faster to move hard disk to another machine with working CD-ROM and install FreeBSD on that hard disk and then put it back to that old clunker.

mdconfig(8) is useful only if you will do something like that from FreeBSD.
In that case you will not need to burn CD at all.

[richardpl]

Sorry, my bad. I read your post rather hasty. No, you can't boot from an ISO as far as i know

I can boot from the iso using qemu.

[Angus77]

@richardpl

Well, the other two machines I have don't take IDE drives, which is what my clunker has. Yes, I enjoy banging my head against walls;)

Formatting the partition to UFS should have been obvious! I put the contents of the .iso on a vfat partition...

I'm going to try installing ufsutils and see if I can get it to work. It may take me e few days before I get the opportunity, but I'll report back on my success or lack thereof after I've tried it.

[Djn]

Going on the qemu idea above:
Split out a disk partition, somehow.
Boot the ISO in qemu, with the new partition as hda.
Inside qemu, do a minimal install to disk, which should give you a bootable FreeBSD install in that partition.

If you can then get that booted somehow (asking grub to chainload it should work), you can then do the rest from there.

Does anyone see any obvious holes in this?

[Angus77]

I installed ufsutils from the Debian repositories, but I can't figure out how to use mkfs.ufs on Linux. Would anyone happen to know? I'm trying to format what Linux calls my sdb3 partition.

[Angus77]

Well, never mind. I've been playing around with FreeBSD in qemu.

I use a Japanese keyboard, and I've run into a problem---some of the keys don't work---most frustratingly the backslash/underscore key doesn't work. Mysteriously, the key makes the cursor jump to the beginning of a line. The delete key is also unresponsive.

I've been pretty persistent with many of the problems I've had with Linux, but this is getting to be more of a hassle than I bargained for. I never would have thought I'd have to spend time remapping the keyboard myself.