Solved [FreeBSD 11] Problem burning a usb stick for i386 system under windows

Hey guys, thanks a lot for your hardwork!
One strange thing i noticed. FreeBSD 11 usb img (both memstick and mini-memstick) could not be burnt on my 32 bit windows 10 machine with neither win32diskimagewriter nor dd for windows... nor with some other unmentioned on the handbook applications like etcher. When i choose to boot from usb screen flashes for a milisec and reboots.
the very same image seems to be burning just fine under linux with sudo dd if=/path/FreeBSD-11.0-RELEASE-i386-mini-memstick.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=sync .
amd64 image burns and installs just fine with win32diskimagewriter.
the pc i'm installing it on is dell vostro a860.
searching for loader bugs did not catch any similar bug reported on https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/query.cgi?format=advanced
will be glad to provide further info.
thanks in advance!
good luck with the further development!
 
i choose to boot from usb screen flashes for a milisec and reboots.
the very same image seems to be burning just fine under linux with sudo dd if=/path/FreeBSD-11.0-RELEASE-i386-mini-memstick.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=sync .
And .... after burning the image using Linux, does it boot on your system ?
It is not very clear if you are experiencing a "burning" issue or a "booting" issue.
 
And .... after burning the image using Linux, does it boot on your system ?
It is not very clear if you are experiencing a "burning" issue or a "booting" issue.

thanks for the quickest reply! you're right, booting issue sounds more appropriate. there are no burning errors in either way (windows or linux), but only after burning with linux i am presented with the boot menu so i can proceed with the install

[EDIT] forgot to mention that my machine uses MBR scheme
 
That means something is going wrong on your windows install, definitely a burning issue, but windows related.
 
Now that the issue is clarified, and you are however able to boot FreeBSD from the stick burned using Linux, and subsequently install, what's the problem you are trying to solve ?
 
it's not that much of the problem, more of a report of a possible issue. like for someone who currently only has windows i386 pc if the problem is universal and not hardware-specific. Maybe it would be of some sort of an interest to investigate that behaviour of windows image writers
 
it's not that much of the problem, more of a report of a possible issue. like for someone who currently only has windows i386 pc if the problem is universal and not hardware-specific. Maybe it would be of some sort of an interest to investigate that behaviour of windows image writers
Reporting and Investigating windows applications behavior would need to be addressed on a windows forum, not here.

could not be burnt on my 32 bit windows 10 machine
Yet, remain to be seen if it is not something specific to your machine.
 
Reporting and Investigating windows applications behavior would need to be addressed on a windows forum, not here.


Yet, remain to be seen if it is not something specific to your machine.

allright, got you. thanks for the walk-through. Will just leave the resulted partitioning scheme of the burnt usb-sticks (3 different sticks of different volume) i gathered anyway in case someone will some time stumble upon this. Sorry it's in Linux format, it still should give a basic idea. Should i mark the thread as solved then for now?

Win32Disk imager
device boot start end Sectors Size id type
/dev/sdb1 1 547728 547728 267.5 M ee GPT
Free space 548864 7823295 724432 3.5G

dd 0.6beta3 for windows, dd command dd if=FreeBSD-11.0-RELEASE-i386-mini-memstick.img od=d: --progress

/dev/sdb1 1 547728 547728 267.5 M ee GPT
Free space 548864 62734335 62185472 29.7 G

Linux dd :
sdb 8:16 1 1.9G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 1 61.5K 0 part
├─sdb2 8:18 1 266.4M 0 part
└─sdb3 8:19 1 1M 0 part
 
Reporting and Investigating windows applications behavior would need to be addressed on a windows forum, not here.

though on the other side the i386 platform being Tier 1 FreeBSD platform (https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/i386.html), and Image Writer for Windows® being "a free application that can correctly write an image file to a memory stick" (https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/bsdinstall-pre.html) it could probably as well be worth noting on the FreeBSD side of things
 
could not be burnt on my 32 bit windows 10 machine with neither win32diskimagewriter nor dd for windows... nor with some other unmentioned on the handbook applications like etcher.

You seems to not see that a common factor among three different applications failure is: your windows machine.
 
You seems to not see that a common factor among three different applications failure is: your windows machine.
only two failures. linux dd is fine as i mentioned earlier. and how come i don't see the windows factor if i state it at the thread title... all i'm saying is according to the handbook i should be perfectly covered with my i386 pc and the Writer for Windows. and apparently i'm not, at least in my single usecase. that's all i'm trying to report.
 
Back to report Fedora Media Writer for Windows did the trick of succesfully (meaning i was able to start and complete the installation procedure) burning i386 memstick to usb. Tested with freebsd 11 as well as freebsd 11.1 images. That makes it the only image writer amongst the ones i tried to do the trick for i386 mbr system. Might be useful for somebody. Marking the thread as solved. Cheers!
 
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