FreeBSD & netbook, need help

Same memstick, same procedure, but I wiped it out with dd if=/dev/zero first, and it works. I'm guessing this was due to leftover GPT stuff at the end of the volume, because this is an 8G stick and it's only a 1G image.

dd for Windows has a /dev/zero pseudo-device that should also work.

For the example above, it would be
[cmd=">"]dd.exe if=/dev/zero of=\\.\f: bs=1M[/cmd]

Do that before writing the image onto the stick.
 
I have just tested FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img. It produces the "Boot error" message, even after supposedly dd-ing zeros over the whole drive. The partition table is clearly wrong. It still shows
Code:
# file -s /dev/da0
/dev/da0: x86 boot sector; partition 1: ID=0xc, active, starthead 1, startsector 63, 15647247 sectors, code offset 0x31

That's what it was before dd supposedly overwrote it--twice!

And the actual image shows
Code:
# file FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img 
/tmp/FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img: x86 boot sector; partition 4: ID=0xa5, active, starthead 0, startsector 0, 50000 sectors, code offset 0x3c, BSD disklabel

This could be a Windows "virus protection" feature, preventing overwriting the boot block. Or it could be a problem with the dd for Windows utility, or something else. When I use FreeBSD's dd to write the memory stick, it works perfectly.

Update: dd for Windows works, but drive letters refer to partitions, not bare disks. So to use dd.exe to write the memory stick, you need to use the --list option, then figure out which of the entries refers to the memory stick and use that as the write target. For my USB stick, it was \\?\Harddisk5\Partition0. I think, USB 1 on that test system so I didn't write the whole stick.

Another option I've found but have not tried is http://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm.
 
Win32-image-writer is working.
I'm dancing! )))

Image wrote very fast. (about 2 minutes )
Installation about 10 minutes. (from USB, not for DOS partition or other)

It is the fastest way to install FreeBSD!!!
 
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