Re: USB Key Disk Boot

From: Francois Tigeot <ftigeot_at_wolfpond.org>
Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 09:02:01 +0100
On Sun, Oct 31, 2004 at 02:04:41PM +0800, JT wrote:
> 
> Has anyone already developed or had experience with getting FreeBSD to run off a USB key disk?
> 
> I am looking to run a minimal FreeBSD build on a USB key disk as a network monitoring system, but I am having great difficulty getting information on how to do so. FreeBSD is my preferred *nix OS, but if I am not able to get a USB boot solution in a reasonable time, I will have to move my project to a Linux based solution as there are already Linux USB boot systems out there. 
> 
> All assistance is appreciated. I think that even if I could get some info on the BSD bootup sequence/etc I might be able to build something workable.

I have no experience with USB booting but if your bios is not too exotic,
it should be doable.
I have created a minimal system you can boot from regular disks, tftp and
flash based devices. I suspect it should also be able to boot from USB keys.

The trick is to use FreeBSD's boot loader to load a ramdisk image with the
kernel. The kernel itself has no knowledge of the boot device, all it knows
is / is md0 and there is no need to mount filesystems.

This page should give some insights on how to create your own ramdisk:
http://www.thinbsd.org/doc.html

-- 
Francois Tigeot
Received on Sun Oct 31 2004 - 07:02:05 UTC

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