Fwd: Can't boot 8.0-BETA4 from USB stick

[James Butler]

2009/9/11 Randi Harper <randi at freebsd.org>:
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 2:48 PM, James Butler <sweetnavelorange at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 2009/9/10 Hans Petter Selasky <hselasky at c2i.net>:
>> > On Thursday 10 September 2009 06:37:13 James Butler wrote:
>> >> Is there anything else worth trying?
>> >
>> > Another brand of memory sticks?
>>
>> I have only the three different brands that I tried (Toshiba and two
>> different no-names). Is there really nothing like an adjustable delay
>> at boot? Perhaps it's time to spend NZD$30 on a CF card and IDE
>> adapter, but that will be of limited use for troubleshooting or
>> installation.
>>
>> -James
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>
> I've been asking around about an option to delay before mounting root as
> well. I don't know of anything off the top of my head, but it sounds to me
> like a bug (or at least a reasonable feature request). Send a PR?

I probably will now, I just wanted to exhaust the existing options. It
seems to me that a "wait for the configured root device to appear"
timeout could be arbitrarily long (eg. 10+ secs) by default without
adversely affecting the normal use case, but I don't claim to know how
the boot process works.

> Have you only tried this on the one computer? It seems suspicious that all
> the cards are having this problem when I've only heard of two cases of USB
> flash-slowness causing problems so far. I'm curious to see if you have the
> same problem using that flash disk with a different computer.

I think I used the same drive to test-install 8.0-BETA1 on my old
Thinkpad X31, which seemed to work OK. This Asus motherboard is a but
useless in other ways; still, 7.2 runs fine.

-James