Making FreeBSD 9 DVD .iso bootable on a USB drive

FreeDomBSD · Mar 3, 2012

T-Daemon said:
You just could install the base FreeBSD system from the working memstick.img, afterwards mount dvd1.iso to that file system with mdconfig() (see below how to) and pkg_add the needed packages from there, presuming he package collection is what you need from the DVD. No need to buy a USB DVD burner.

# mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /path/to/image.img -u 0
# mount -t cd9660 /dev/md0 /mnt
After you are done:
# umount /mnt
# mdconfig -d -u 0

Thanks! Great idea! I didn't think of it at all. I'll try it regardless if my success of failure with making a bootable USB drive from an .iso of the FreeBSD DVD.

tingo · Mar 3, 2012

FreeDomBSD said:
I tried to boot off the USB and one again: nothing.

Exactly how did you try to boot from this usb drive? Did you press the boot menu key (F8 on some BIOSes, F12 on others), or ...?

FreeDomBSD said:
Meanwhile GParted thinks that the drive is unformatted and as I've mentioned it won't boot from it.

What has GParted to do with booting anything? In my world GParted is used to partition a disk, it is not a boot manager...

FreeDomBSD said:
Maybe all I need now is a boot sector? How can I add one?

The image (.img) and the iso (.iso) already contains a boot sector. Why do you think that replacing it with another one would help anything?
Either your machine can boot from a boot sector, or it can't.

FreeDomBSD · Mar 3, 2012

I have a newer Thinkpad I'm trying this on. It boots from a live Ubuntu USB drive (that's how I used the dd command) and from the USB drive that I made with FreeBSD 9 .img. I don't have to press anything: the Thinkpad automatically set up to boot from USB first.

For the heck of it I tried it on a desktop PC with the same (non-booting) results.

As for other things, I'm just trying different things and brainstorming. I don't know much about UNIXes, but I was attempting to work through the problem with what I knew about:

Gparted says: there are no partitions on the disk, but I definitely see a file system with folders and files -- so I mention it. I didn't mean to confuse/offend.

linuxmq · Mar 22, 2015

I realized this is 3 years old now and FreeBSD has moved to newer files. However I noticed that the issue is very similar among several ISO burning to USB questions using any of the available conversion/burning applications such as Unetbootin.

I also had similar issues. I go through the entire process to end up with a USB stick that just can't boot.

Until I realized that the partition that is supposed to be booting is not "active" or not flagged as "boot".

If using Unetbootin in Windows, launch Diskpart and select your disk and partition. then just type "active".
If using Unetbootin in Linux, launch gparted and right click the partition to boot, then select "manage flag" and click "boot".

This hopefully should help resolve your non booting stick.

It worked for me.

Areeb Qaisar · Nov 21, 2016

linuxmq said:
I realized this is 3 years old now and FreeBSD has moved to newer files. However I noticed that the issue is very similar among several ISO burning to USB questions using any of the available conversion/burning applications such as Unetbootin.

I also had similar issues. I go through the entire process to end up with a USB stick that just can't boot.

Until I realized that the partition that is supposed to be booting is not "active" or not flagged as "boot".

If using Unetbootin in Windows, launch Diskpart and select your disk and partition. then just type "active".
If using Unetbootin in Linux, launch gparted and right click the partition to boot, then select "manage flag" and click "boot".

This hopefully should help resolve your non booting stick.

It worked for me.

But in case of FreeBSD, it did not worked for me

dave · Nov 21, 2016

Now you can just use the memstick images and write them directly to USB

Areeb Qaisar · Nov 22, 2016

dave said:
Now you can just use the memstick images and write them directly to USB

Yes, but the Memstick editions lacks many packages.
To install a Desktop Environment such as KDE etc we need to connect to internet and download the packages.
In case of KDE, I remember the download size was around 1 GB, which is huge.

ANOKNUSA · Nov 22, 2016

Areeb Qaisar said:
In case of KDE, I remember the download size was around 1 GB, which is huge.

It pretty much all equals out in the end. KDE plus all dependencies is about 1GB to download. The DVD image is over 2GB. The CD image will almost certainly lack some packages you want, necessitating that you install them from the Internet. It doesn't matter how the packages get on your system; ultimately, you're going to have to download more than 1GB to get the FreeBSD desktop you want.

Areeb Qaisar · Nov 25, 2016

ANOKNUSA said:
It pretty much all equals out in the end. KDE plus all dependencies is about 1GB to download. The DVD image is over 2GB. The CD image will almost certainly lack some packages you want, necessitating that you install them from the Internet. It doesn't matter how the packages get on your system; ultimately, you're going to have to download more than 1GB to get the FreeBSD desktop you want.

Absolutely true. But in my case, I am a FreeBSD Beginner, and while configuring I made up mistakes, which made the system non-bootable. Therefore I had to install FreeBSD a couple of time in last few days. So for me, I was looking for a method to install from DVD.