Installing FreeBSD 9.0 using USB flash drive

H

horus33

Hello I am new user here, and also new to *BSD world.
I want to install minimal bare-bones FreeBSD 9.0 and I checked ISO images available. The smallest one is FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso which (as I read in manual) is intended for burning to CD. Now, is there a way that I could burn that image to USB stick and boot from it?

Greetings.
 
Download the memstick version: FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img
 
Yes, I know there is memstick version. But it is ~4,16281862 times larger than image I mentioned in my previous post. And I can't really afford myself that much traffic here. Also I have a very poor connection.
 
Of course it's going to be X times larger than the image you mentioned because the image you mentioned - bootonly - will do just that: only boot. All the files needed during the installation are then downloaded.

The memstick image will install the entire FreeBSD system, which is "minimal bare-bones", that is without any third-party application (Xorg, *DE/*WM, etc.)
Maybe you're in fact looking for a trimmed down version of FreeBSD such as NanoBSD but you'd need a working FreeBSD setup to build it anyway.

Also, I doubt you could make a CD/DVD image work on a USB stick without modifying a few bits.
 
horus33 said:
Yes, I know there is memstick version. But it is ~4,16281862 times larger than image I mentioned in my previous post. And I can't really afford myself that much traffic here. Also I have very poor connection.

?
Click to expand...

Code: 
 wget -c -nd ...
will start the download where it was interrupted, usually. (Somewhere there is also a version for windows available.)
 
horus33 said:
Yes, I know there is memstick version. But it is ~4,16281862 times larger than image I mentioned in my previous post. And I can't really afford myself that much traffic here. Also I have very poor connection.

?
Click to expand...

He has a point. It would be nice if there were a bootonly memstick image.
 
You used to be able to install FreeBSD by downloading two floppy images and booting those. Everything else would be installed from the internet.

But as far as I know the support for that stopped somewhere around 8.0.
 
SirDice said:
You used to be able to install FreeBSD by downloading two floppy images and booting those. Everything else would be installed from the internet.

But as far as I know the support for that stopped somewhere around 8.0.
Click to expand...

The bootonly.iso is exactly that, and replaces the floppies. It contains only the required files to boot the machine and do a net install.
 
You're missing the OP's problem, which is low bandwidth. The point is not to be able to boot a USB-based bootonly ISO or what was the group of floppies needed to run the setup, the point is being able to trim down the entire system.

Let's see, what's required to install FreeBSD? The base.txz and kernel.txz archives, as well as a working basic system, that is a boot chain, a kernel, some libraries, a shell, etc.
I remember the old livefs images were around 200MB and the 2 archives mentioned above are almost 100MB big. That's still more than half of the memstick.
 
There's an easier way...

horus33 said:
Hello I am new user here, and also new to *BSD world.
I want to install minimal bare-bones FreeBSD 9.0 and I checked ISO images available. The smallest one is FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso which (as I read in manual) is intended for burning to CD. Now, is there a way that I could burn that image to USB stick and boot from it??
Click to expand...

If I were you, I would go to the local computer shop, buy a cheap USB CD/DVD drive and use that to boot FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso.
 
Beastie said:
You're missing the OP's problem, which is low bandwidth. The point is not to be able to boot a USB-based bootonly ISO or what was the group of floppies needed to run the setup, the point is being able to trim down the entire system.

Let's see, what's required to install FreeBSD? The base.txz and kernel.txz archives, as well as a working basic system, that is a boot chain, a kernel, some libraries, a shell, etc.
I remember the old livefs images were around 200MB and the 2 archives mentioned above are almost 100MB big. That's still more than half of the memstick.
Click to expand...


The question the OP asked is: "Now, is there a way that I could burn that image [FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso] to USB stick and boot from it?"

I believe what's required to install FreeBSD is, at a minimum, the bootonly.iso.
 
mix_room said:
As it says in the handbook the cd-iso can be adapted to boot from usb-drive
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-advanced.html

I don't see why this should not be applicable to the bootonly-iso. Try it.
Click to expand...

All I see there is modifying install images to boot with a serial console.

Some people have reported just dd(1)ing the ISO image to a USB stick and being able to boot from it. That didn't work on two machines I just tried, but it could depend on the BIOS.

A lot of people try http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/, but not always with success.
 
Okay, thank you all for answering but I got my way around it. I borrowed a FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE (full) DVD from friend of mine and installed everything I needed.
Now I want to upgrade to 9.0-RELEASE but I have problem.
After running
Code: 
freebsd-update -r 9.0-RELEASE upgrade
, I get following output:
Code: 
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 4 mirrors found.
Fetching metadata signature for 8.0-RC1 from update4.FreeBSD.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.
Inspecting system... done.

The following components of FreeBSD seem to be installed:
kernel/generic world/base world/dict world/doc world/manpages

The following components of FreeBSD do not seem to be installed:
src/base src/bin src/cddl src/contrib src/crypto src/etc src/games
src/gnu src/include src/krb5 src/lib src/libexec src/release src/rescue
src/sbin src/secure src/share src/sys src/tools src/ubin src/usbin
world/catpages world/games world/info world/proflibs

Does this look reasonable (y/n)? y [enter]

Fetching metadata signature for 9.0-RELEASE from update4.FreeBSD.org... done.
Fetching metadata index... done.

The update metadata is correctly signed, but
failed an integrity check.
Cowardly refusing to proceed any further.

what should i do?
 
Try again, some files seem to have been corrupted during download.
 
SirDice said:
Try again, some files seem to have been corrupted during download.
Click to expand...

Ok, I did it now. I deleted everything downloaded by freebsd-update and then started
Code: 
freebsd-update -r 9.0-RELEASE upgrade
, but I am getting same error again.
 
Ok, problem solved by updating in this order:

[CMD="horus#"]freebsd-update -r 8.1-RELEASE upgrade[/CMD]
[CMD="horus#"]freebsd-update install[/CMD]
[CMD="horus#"]freebsd-update fetch[/CMD]
[CMD="horus#"]freebsd-update install[/CMD]
[CMD="horus#"]freebsd-update -r 9.0-RELEASE upgrade[/CMD]
[CMD="horus#"]freebsd-update install[/CMD]

Thank you kpa!
 
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