Installing FreeBSD onto a USB stick

Posted by Ceri Davies Mon, 20 Mar 2006 22:55:00 GMT

Note: this is pretty much obsoleted by the followup article. You really should read that one instead.

It seems that a bunch of folks are ending up here by searching for instructions for installing FreeBSD on a USB stick, so here they are.

I'll assume that, like me, you don't have any SCSI disks and so your USB stick will show up on da0. I'm also assuming that you don't care much for the data on there.

The easy way

A little secret - the easy way to do this is to boot from the installation CDROM while you have the USB stick in and just install to it.

You didn't come here for that though, did you?

The slightly more involved way

It doesn't qualify as "hard".

You'll still need to grab that ISO — get the latest one.

• Mount that ISO on /dist:

     # mkdir /dist
     # mdconfig -a -f /a/FreeBSD/6.1-BETA4-i386-disc1.iso
     md17
     # mount -t cd9660 /dev/md17 /dist

• Insert the stick. They come preformatted with a FAT32 partition on, so we'll need to throw a BSD slice label on there — this command will destroy all existing slices. If you get a warning regarding "Geom not found", don't worry.:

  # fdisk -BI /dev/da0
  

• We need a disk label:

  # bsdlabel -B -w da0s1
  

• and a filesystem, which we'll mount on /mnt:

  # newfs -U /dev/da0s1a
  /dev/da0s1a: 481.0MB (985040 sectors) block size 16384, fragment size 2048
          using 4 cylinder groups of 120.25MB, 7696 blks, 15424 inodes.
          with soft updates
    super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
    160, 246432, 492704, 738976
  # mount /dev/da0s1a /mnt
  

• Now to do an install the blindingly easy way:

  # cd /dist/6.1-BETA4/base
  # DESTDIR=/mnt ./install.sh 
  You are about to extract the base distribution into /mnt - are you SURE
  you want to do this over your installed system (y/n)? y
  

• Since we are using 6.1-BETA4, there is some additional messing about to do. This is very likely to change in later release candidates (since it is somewhat broken), but this works for 6.1-BETA4:

  # cd /dist/6.1-BETA4/kernels
  # DESTDIR=/mnt sh ./install.sh generic
  # rmdir /mnt/boot/kernel
  # mv /mnt/GENERIC /mnt/boot/kernel
  

• Make the USB stick bootable:

  # boot0cfg -v -B da0
  #   flag     start chs   type       end chs       offset         size
  1   0x80      0:  1: 1   0xa5    480: 63:32           32       985056
  
  
  version=1.0  drive=0x80  mask=0xf  ticks=182
  options=packet,update,nosetdrv
  default_selection=F1 (Slice 1)
  

• Create an fstab(5) file on the USB stick. Here's a simple one:

  /dev/da0s1a /      ufs    rw                      1 1
  md          /tmp   mfs    rw,-s16M,nosuid,noatime 0 0
  /dev/acd0   /cdrom cd9660 ro,noauto,nosuid        0 0
  proc        /proc  procfs rw                      0 0
  

• Install any packages you might want:

  # chroot /mnt /bin/sh
  # pkg_add -r lsof rsync unzip zsh kde...
  

You're done.