USB install

B

Bellum

So. Circumstances have me stuck on an old computer without a CD/DVD burner and Windows XP. I've been using Windows 7 for a while, and have found migrating back to XP to be pretty frustrating. I ended up installing a blackbox clone for Windows and replacing most of the utilities just to up my productivity, and eventually decided it would be better just to get it over with and install a different OS.

I tried out FreeBSD on VM and quite liked it. There are a few things I need to figure out before I go and install it so I don't have to re-install Windows just to check the documentation, but first I'd like to at least be able to boot the setup utility.

I've got a "SanDisk U3 Cruzer Micro USB Device" with the U3 software removed. I've tried using the Win32 Disk Imager Utility mentioned in the Handbook to install memstick.img, but all it ever seems to do is corrupt my flash drive. After looking around a bit, I tried using UNetbootin to install disk1.iso. It seems to work, but I can't get it to boot.

The BIOS setup seems to allow me to boot from USB, so I think I'm just screwing up when installing to the USB. Anyone have any experience with similar problems, or know where I'm going wrong?
 
"U3 removed" as in used the Sandisk program to remove the U3 silliness? The Handbook procedure was written and tested with a standard USB memory stick.
 
That's right. I've had to reformat it several times with the HP utility, but every time I use the Win32 Disk Imager, it just ends up corrupting it again. Maybe I should try the version of FreeBSD provided by UNetbootin, but it's slightly older.
 
Ah. May be my BIOS after all. Here suggests that to get this old lady to read my flash drives I have to work some bit of magic.
 
HP utility? Sandisk has their own special U3 killer (had, anyway, when I had one of them).

Also, what do you mean by "corrupt the flash drive"? What does it do when you try to boot from it?
 
No, sorry, I used the Sandisk utility to remove the U3 software. I used the HP utility to format the USB drive because Sandisk had it it split into two partitions and Windows couldn't fix it.

By "corrupt", I mean it broke the filesystem on the drive. Nothing was written on it and I had to reformat every time. I think I've found why the UNetbootin method didn't work, however. As I've said, this is an older computer. I thought it had a USB boot option, but it only has a "USB-ZIP" option. There seems to be some sort of magic that I can still use, which I will hopefully be able to do over FreeBSD and that will hopefully still work on my 2GB flash drive. Yeesh. :P
 
U3 is a firmware hack that hard-partitions the flash into two areas and presents them to the host as two seperate USB devices behind a hub. One device looks like a CD-ROM and contains the U3 software, and the other looks like your standard flash drive.

As stated already, you need the proper utility to modify the device firmware and make the drive look like a single flash device. Get it here.

You mentioned that your USB drive gets "corrupted" each time you try to write the memstick image? What makes you think that?

Bear in mind that the memstick image is an image of a disk with a bsdlabel and containing a single UFS partition. Windows won't recognise this and will probably say "The disk in drive X is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"
 
plop can USB-boot old systems. Without a CD to boot plop, though... maybe a floppy?

Another option is to temporarily connect the drive from the CD-less machine to another system; disconnect other drives to protect them. Do a basic FreeBSD install, then swap the drive back.
 
jem said:
Bear in mind that the memstick image is an image of a disk with a bsdlabel and containing a single UFS partition. Windows won't recognise this and will probably say "The disk in drive X is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?"
Click to expand...

Ah, that makes sense. Didn't think about that.

It has to be the BIOS, then.
 
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