Other Making bootable USB stick from bootable ISO image

balanga said:
Should I expect to be able to create a bootable USB stick using dd() to copy a bootable ISO 9660 to the USB stick?
Click to expand...
No. ISO-9660 uses the "el torito" extensions for bootable media. USB sticks use the same as ordinary hard drives, either a "classic" bootloader that starts by reading/executing the MBR, or an ESP (EFI system partition).
balanga said:
Is there any way to make the USB stick bootable?
Click to expand...
Yes. Either you can obtain "normal" bootcode (classic/CSM or EFI) that matches whatever you want to boot and just copy the *files* from your ISO image. Or you try your luck with a bootloader that's able to boot an ISO image from a file, e.g. SYSLINUX.
 
Is this a FreeBSD image or something else? If FreeBSD, is there a corresponding memstick image that is designed for burning to a USB stick?
sysutils/unetbootin may do the trick
 
mer said:
Is this a FreeBSD image or something else? If FreeBSD, is there a corresponding memstick image that is designed for burning to a USB stick?
sysutils/unetbootin may do the trick
Click to expand...
Thanks, I'll give it a try, I didn't such a program existed on FreeBSD, and no it isn't a FreeBSD image.
 
mer said:
Is this a FreeBSD image or something else? If FreeBSD, is there a corresponding memstick image that is designed for burning to a USB stick?
sysutils/unetbootin may do the trick
Click to expand...

Since ~12.1-RELEASE, all FreeBSD installation .iso images are 'hybrid' images that may be burned to optical media or dd 'd to USB sticks.

balanga said:
Thanks, I'll give it a try, I didn't such a program existed on FreeBSD, and no it isn't a FreeBSD image.
Click to expand...

Last week I succeeded with installing a BIOS + EC update to a Lenovo X200 using a Ventoy USB stick.

Ventoy

www.ventoy.net www.ventoy.net

The neat thing about Ventoy is that once installed on a stick, you can copy as many .iso files to it as will fit, boot it on anything that can boot USB, and choose which .iso to install from a menu.

There are windows and linux versions, not FreeBSD, but once made you can copy files to it from anything thereafter.

You can also allocate space for another partition that you could read from or write to during particular installations.

I had W10 handy, so used that to install Ventoy to a 32G stick. The main partition where you copy your .isos to can be exfat (default), fat32, ntfs, ext2/3/4 as desired. fat32 of course can't contain DVD images >4GiB.

I was impressed with how well it worked after its clarity and depth of documentation.
 
zirias@ said:
No. ISO-9660 uses the "el torito" extensions for bootable media. USB sticks use the same as ordinary hard drives, either a "classic" bootloader that starts by reading/executing the MBR, or an ESP (EFI system partition).

Yes. Either you can obtain "normal" bootcode (classic/CSM or EFI) that matches whatever you want to boot and just copy the *files* from your ISO image. Or you try your luck with a bootloader that's able to boot an ISO image from a file, e.g. SYSLINUX.
Click to expand...

Any pointers on how to do this?

If I :-

Bash: 
# gpart create -s mbr da0
# gpart bootcode -b /boot/mbr da0

can I then create a fat32 partition and then dd() the ISO to that partition?
 
It looks as though I might be able to create a bootable USB stick using syslinux() which I'm pleased to see is available as a FreeBSD pkg.

SYSLINUX - Syslinux Wiki

wiki.syslinux.org wiki.syslinux.org

Unfortunately when I run it I get:-

Code: 
syslinux: invalid media signature (not an FAT/NTFS volume?)

I thought I had managed to create a FAT32 partition correctly. Can anyone suggest what I have done wrong here:- ?

Code: 
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 bs=512 count=34
gpart create -s mbr da1
gpart bootcode -b /boot/mbr da1
gpart add -t fat32 da1
newfs_msdos -F32 /dev/da1s1
syslinux -f  --install /dev/da1 --directory syslinux
 
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