I have successfully installed FreeBSD 7.2Release (i386) from a
USB flash drive. It involves a little more work than installing
from CD/DVD but the convenience of having it on a USB flash drive
makes it worth it.
I created a single bootable slice with only a "/" partition. Then I used tar to copy everything from the FreeBSD DVD ISO image to the
flash drive. I know cpio is a potentially better way to do it, but
I wanted to keep this description simple.
The problem that people have posted on before is that they did not
know how to mount an "existing filesystem" so "sysinstall" can
find the files. Well, this is fairly simple to do as it turns out.
During the drive selection, you see the IDE drive you want to
install to, and the USB flash drive. Select both , but only partition
the destination drive. When you create the mount points for the
new drive, you will see an entry for the existing USB flash drive
filesystem with no mount point of its own, yet. Select that entry
and hit "m" to set the mount point. I set mine to /mnt, of course
after I created the "/" entry on the destination drive. Now you
have the mount point, and you can tell sysinstall to mount it
as an existing file system.
I put together a crude first approximation of the process at
http://www.pa.msu.edu/people/tigner/BootUSB.html. I will try
to clean it up when I get a chance, or feel free to improve on
it yourself .
USB flash drive. It involves a little more work than installing
from CD/DVD but the convenience of having it on a USB flash drive
makes it worth it.
I created a single bootable slice with only a "/" partition. Then I used tar to copy everything from the FreeBSD DVD ISO image to the
flash drive. I know cpio is a potentially better way to do it, but
I wanted to keep this description simple.
The problem that people have posted on before is that they did not
know how to mount an "existing filesystem" so "sysinstall" can
find the files. Well, this is fairly simple to do as it turns out.
During the drive selection, you see the IDE drive you want to
install to, and the USB flash drive. Select both , but only partition
the destination drive. When you create the mount points for the
new drive, you will see an entry for the existing USB flash drive
filesystem with no mount point of its own, yet. Select that entry
and hit "m" to set the mount point. I set mine to /mnt, of course
after I created the "/" entry on the destination drive. Now you
have the mount point, and you can tell sysinstall to mount it
as an existing file system.
I put together a crude first approximation of the process at
http://www.pa.msu.edu/people/tigner/BootUSB.html. I will try
to clean it up when I get a chance, or feel free to improve on
it yourself .