Booting BSD using "USB-ZIP" on older systems with USB-HDD

K

kattadaemon

I have an older system, the BIOS does not support USB-HDD boot but it has USB-ZIP and USB-CD ROM support, I can install BSD from USB-CDROM but wondering how can I can I trick the BIOS by modifying the number of heads and sectors being displayed from the USB stick to match that of a zip drive.

In Linux mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sdx 0 64 32 set the geometry of the flash drive to "64 heads, 32 sectors"

Here is how this is done in Linux:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/booting-linux-from-usb-zip-on-older-systems/

Does any one know how to do this in BSD? May be fdisk(8)?
 
If you follow the instructions on the FreeBSD download page, for the memstick image, and write it to a flash drive/memstick. I wouldn't be at all surprised if enabling both USB-ZIP, and USB-CDROM support in your BIOS, and then plugging the memstick into the first USB port, and powering down the computer, and starting it, wouldn't cause the computer to see the memstick as a valid boot device. Years back, I had an old laptop that required proprietary floppy, and cdrom drives, which I didn't have. I was able to boot the memstick to do the install. If that fails, you might want to take a look at PXE booting (https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-diskless.html#idp80582608).

Best wishes.

--Chris
 
Chris,

Thanks for the reply.
I tried memstick image but that does not work because the issue is USB stick and USB-ZIP has different geometry.
Without changing the usb stick geometry to match USB-ZIP's geometry ie "64 heads, 32 sectors" bios does not recognize USB stick (physical device)

I'm guessing it may be possible write the "64 heads, 32 sectors" into portion table of usb strick with fdisk or some other bsd command

Thanks
Katta
 
Hmm.... Sorry to hear that. I was fairly sure your computer might see it as a USB-CDROM.
Speaking of... something just occurred to me, that might work for you -- requires no math, too!
You could probably grab the bootonly iso image, and mount(8) it on /mnt. If you mount(8) it as cd9660 (mount -t cd9660), you might well be able to dd(1) the mounted image to your memstick/flash drive. eg;
dd if=/mnt of=/your/usb/memstick.
This method should trick your computer into believing you have a CDROM attached to your USB port. DO insure it's plugged into the first USB port, as it seems to make the difference on the older hardware.

Best wishes, and good luck, kattadaemon!

--Chris
 
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