Did somebody boot old Sony Vaio laptop from FreeBSD memstick successfully?

[Julian H. Stacey]

For my best guess, skim down to ****

Lev Serebryakov wrote:
> Hello, Julian.
> You wrote 28 января 2014 г., 18:49:36:
> 
> JHS> I suppose 32 bit CPUs will freak at/above 4G = 4,294,967,296
> JHS> & what with cavalier mixing on int / unsigned, above 2G may be tempring fate.
>   It boots from installed WinXP and works fine. 

Could it be you have a 32/64 bit mismatch ? Or an MD5 error.
Or a flakey USB sector ? ... but I recall you said stick is OK on another PC.

I suggest post exactly what [little] you see through the boot
procedure, then maybe someone can identify whats going wrong.

/boot/loader.conf
	boot_verbose="yes"

but I suppose you'r not getting that far.

So How about '?' to boot ? see man boot.

Maybe the laptop also has a pcmcia card (for eg a cdrom) or an
ethernet pxe boot ?

Or try an older Free/Net BSD ? Even back to venerable 4.11
(umm well, maybe not that old with USB as 4.11 has no USB I recall,
 but it probably supports pcmcia cd boot)
... or find a friend to loan a usb cdrom drive ...

Once you have any sort of FreeBSD on you'll know a lot more.
Or try a Linux such as maybe Knoppix & see what that shows.

A friend last year tried a USB stick I'd made with an MBR, & though
it worked for me, it didnt for him, I suspect in a similar way as for you - I think
'cos the major numbers of the usb or hard drive were off by one - one can
set that manually from keyboard at boot
	man boot

(or maybe it was off by 4 ?) ...
There's also some mess between MBRs, & device naming 
( eg on my sata box new names /dev/ada[01]s[1-4] versus older
/dev/ad[46]s[1-4] ) , I recently wrote new boot sectors on
a disc on a box & now have disparity on mount names, example:

	/dev/ada1s1a on / (ufs, NFS exported, local)
	/dev/ada0s2a on /ad4s2 (ufs, local)
	/dev/ada0s2d on /ad4s2/var (ufs, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada0s2e on /ad4s2/tmp (ufs, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada0s2f on /ad4s2/usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada0s3a on /ad4s3 (ufs, NFS exported, local)
	/dev/ada0s3d on /ad4s3/var (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada0s3e on /ad4s3/tmp (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada0s3f on /ad4s3/usr (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada0s4a on /ad4s4 (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada1s1d on /var (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada1s1e on /tmp (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada1s1f on /usr (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada1s2a on /ad6s2 (ufs, NFS exported, local)
	/dev/ada1s2d on /ad6s2/var (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada1s2e on /ad6s2/tmp (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada1s2f on /ad6s2/usr (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates)
	/dev/ada1s3a on /ad6s3 (ufs, NFS exported, local)
	/dev/ada1s3d on /ad6s3/var (ufs, NFS exported, local)
	/dev/ada1s3e on /ad6s3/usr (ufs, NFS exported, local)
	/dev/ada1s4a on /ad6s4 (ufs, NFS exported, local, soft-updates)

My new 9.2 failed to boot until I told it root was no longer (per for my 9.1)
ad6s3 but was now (for my 9.2) ada1s1

see man boot (8) for naming, eg
	Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader

Probably the bit to fix is in your USB stick, try /boot/loader.conf
	mfsroot_load="YES"
	mfsroot_type="mfs_root"
	mfsroot_name="/boot/mfsroot"
****	vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/da0s1a"

Unless like my friend last year, maybe you have some internal USB
stick or some such, consuming da0, so your external usb stick may
appear as da1, as I think happened to him.


> And it is equipped with
>   (only, sigh) 2G of RAM.

My 9.1 desktop has 1G, my 10 lap 3G, & my gate host 40M, you'll survive :-)

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultant, Munich http://berklix.com
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