Installation media: howto create USB installer from DVD ISO image

xanda

xanda

We would like to install FreeBSD on a system that has no optical drive but find the standard memstick image too limited in terms of the available packages.
To get around this, we have downloaded the DVD1/ISO installer file and tried to create a USB stick from it using Win32DiskImager. Unfortunately this hasn't worked.
At this time we are limited to using a Windows 7 system to create the installer media.
Having trawled the handbook, there appears no obvious way to us, yet it seems an elementary step.
Please would someone be kind enough to point out what we might be overlooking?
Thanks
 
The way FreeBSD boots is different for a CD/DVD image compared to a memory stick image. So you cannot convert the ISO to a memstick image as it's commonly done with Linux.

As the packages are always old by the time you install them why don't you download a complete package repository and put that on a separate stick?
 
SirDice said:
The way FreeBSD boots is different for a CD/DVD image compared to a memory stick image. So you cannot convert the ISO to a memstick image as it's commonly done with Linux.

As the packages are always old by the time you install them why don't you download a complete package repository and put that on a separate stick?
Click to expand...
Thanks - we didn't realise this was possible. Which part of the Handbook do we refer to for this?
 
I don't think it's in the handbook. You would need some download tool to get all the packages though.
 
xanda said:
We would like to install FreeBSD on a system that has no optical drive but find the standard memstick image too limited in terms of the available packages.
Click to expand...

You may find that even if you use the DVD installer, it still is very limited in comparison to most Linux distributions. Your best bet is to install the system from memstick, and then run freebsd-update after your first log-in.
As for the packages/ports, there are several options, depending on whether you want to install binary packages or compile yourself, for example:
  • pkg install <name>
  • download the whole ports tree from any mirror, like http://ftp.plusline.de/FreeBSD/ports/ports/ports.tar.gz and untar that into /usr/ports
  • install subversion ( pkg install subversion) and check out the tree, like svn co http://svn0.eu.freebsd.org/ports/head /usr/ports
Of course you can do all that from within the shell in the installer too, but that's slightly more involved.
 
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