compiling kernel / booting from usb

[Armin Arh]

On Sat, Dec 23, 2006 at 02:23:26PM -0800, walt wrote:
> Haidut wrote:
> > I've had no trouble installing Dfly directly on a 512MB USB memory
> > stick just as I would on a normal HDD and it booted fine.
> 
> Excellent work.  I think a feat like that should be explained in
> the DragonFly wiki.  I know I would like to try it :o)

For me it did not work with my 128MB stick on my 3 year old desktop.
I think it would be a good idea to collect negative examples, too
(listing hardware not capable booting from USB)

I did (out of running system. installation cdrom will work, too):

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 bs=32k count=16
fdisk -I da1
fdisk -B da1
boot0cfg -B da1
boot0cfg -v da1
disklabel -B -r -w da1s1 auto
# edit the label manually:
disklabel -e da1s1
newfs /dev/da1s1a
mount /dev/da1s1a /mnt
mkdir /mnt/tmp
cpdup / /mnt
chmod 1777 /mnt/tmp
# just for recovery (good idea to copy there the hard disk infos, too)
disklabel da1s1 > /mnt/etc/disklabel.da1s1

This works well with my SCSI attached ZIP drive (media changer),
and should therefore work with any media capable of booting.
It is detected as 'da1' at runtime. da0 is my Firewire attached disk.

I use this scenary because my internal hard drive is dedicated to FreeBSD
and i need a booting mechanism for my self compiled kernel.
(Can't boot from Firewire)

Cheers
Armin
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