BTX on USB pen drive

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Fri, 7 Mar 2008, Vincent Mialon wrote:
> I tested various options in boot0cfg with no sucess. I also tested
> the howto from
> http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/04/13/installing-freebsd-on-u
>sb-stick-episode-2 with a 6.3 FreeBSD release which boots on my pc but
> doesn't boot on my supermicro server.
>
> Do you have any idea or pointer that may help me find the way to boot
> this usb drive ? I may file a bug report if you want.

I wanted to make a USB flash drive based installer for FreeBSD but 
unfortunately BTX seems to have issues that make it difficult to do 
reliably :(

Here are 2 patches I tried..
http://people.freebsd.org/~kib/realbtx
http://people.freebsd.org/~jhb/patches/btx_crx.patch

They improved things but I still found a number of systems where BTX 
would spin dumping register info so fast I couldn't read it (or take a 
photo..).

Unfortunately I have no idea how you'd debug this sort of thing, it's 
too much like DOS programming for me :)

FWIW when it did work it was great :) I used FreeSBIE as my base - it 
has stuff to build USB images in CVS (v2). http://www.freesbie.org/

I don't know if it's possible to use GRUB or something like that instead 
of BTX.. I have no experience with it, but I would be very interested 
if it did work (although since GRUB is i386 only and I use amd64 
systems that's another hurdle..)

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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