can't boot from USB if i make the filesystem from scratch

[longneck]

I have an HP thinclient that I want to boot from a USB stick. I downloaded the memstick installer, wrote it to a second USB stick, and installed FreeBSD on the first USB stick using the standard install process.

Here's the problem: Attempting to boot off the first USB stick, the computer freezes at the BIOS screen.

After much troubleshooting, I was finally able to get the system to boot off the first stick as follows:

1. boot off memstick installer on second USB stick.
2. go to LiveCD
3. dd first couple of sectors of the second USB stick to the first USB stick.
4. kernel complains that the drive geometry on the disk doesn't match what the BIOS reports.
5. use fdisk to grow the partition.
6. use newfs to format the partition.
7. run bsdinstall, mark the partition as /, and complete install.

Except for the kernel complaining on every boot that the drive geometry on the disk doesn't match what the BIOS reports, it works fine.

What information can I provide to help figure out what the problem is?

 

[wblock@]

The standard install uses GPT partitions. Try using MBR instead: http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?p=149210&postcount=13. On a memory stick, allocate most of it to /, don't create separate /var,/tmp, or /usr. Use the remaining space for swap.

 

[longneck]

I've tried both MBR and GPT, both with the same result.

What command can I run to display the current configuration or partition table or whatever, then I'll reinstall using the broken method and run the same command to compare?

 

[wblock@]

% gpart show da0
or
% gpart show da0s1
to see the partitions in an MBR slice.