A Tale Of Two USB Pen Drives

Vincent DEFERT 20.100 at defert.com
Fri Sep 18 13:42:30 PDT 2020


FreeBSD has the following line in it's USB images /boot/loader.conf:

vfs.mountroot.timeout="10"

It may help to include it in DragonFly's.

On 18/09/2020 22:18, nacho Lariguet wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Sep 2020 21:02:51 +0200
> Alexander Shendi <Alexander.Shendi at web.de> wrote:
>
>> Dear list,
>>
>> so yesterday I decided to try out Dragonfly BSD. So I booted OpenBSD 6.8-beta on my trusty Lenovo Thinkpad X220 and promptly downloaded the 5.8.1 release memstick image. I then used dd(1) to copy it to /dev/rsd1c and rebooted. I rejoiced that the image booted but was dismayed that it asked me to specify the root fs. Choices of da0 da0s4 and da8 were displayed. By subsequent use of "lsdev -v" at the boot prompt I determined that "da8" probably was the correct choice, with da0s4 being the OpenBSD partition, which I wanted to leave alone.
>>
>> Use of "ufs:da8", "hammer2:da8", "ffs:da8" all gave an error reading sector 0 of the device.
>> I thought that the pen drive might be defective and went to town to buy another one. That didn't help. Neither did using the current snapshot help.
>>
>> I'm now at loss what to do. I like challenges and simply using the working OpenBSD installation won't do.
>>
>> I would be grateful for any help, or pointers to any dics that I can RTFM. TIA.
>>
>> Best Regards,
>>
>> /Alexander
> I hit the same issue last month: all of my Kingston DataTraveller G3s (and I got a lot of them) left me at the boot prompt with the same message asking me to specify the location of the file-system. (see my attached image)
>
> At first I suspected bad firmware on the Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny M715q I was attempting to boot into (from my experience IBM and Lenovo being the worst uEFI implementations I ever seen, full of bugs), but, after a while, it seemed evident it was not the firmware since every other liveCD I throwed at the machine booted flawlessly, that including even pfSense and, of course, many linux distros.
>
> Try the following: when it asks for the fs and you don't see your drive listed, wait a couple of minutes (2+ minutes of my Lenovo) and probably you'll see kernel messages showing the drive detected after a while, at this point enter ? again and you'll see your boot drive (the USB key) listed, from then on, it is straightforward to boot the liveCD.
>
> It is like the USB keys are not properly detected sometimes, or, detected but the kernel waits for something to complete, or whatever.
>
> FYI: even after successfully installing dragonFlyBSD I came across the same issue every time I insert a Kingston USB key. I encounter this issue in uEFI mode, I don't now right now if it also pops up booting in BIOS mode.

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