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

[Lev Serebryakov]

Hello, Julian.
You wrote 28 января 2014 г., 23:47:31:

JHS> but I suppose you'r not getting that far.
JHS> So How about '?' to boot ? see man boot.
  No "freebsd-related" boot messages shows. Laptop shows same message "No
 operating system" with empty USB flash, without USB flash at all (if I
 disable booting from internal HDD), with USB flash without MBR (dd
 if=/FreeBSD-10.0-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img of=/dev/da4) with USB flash with
 MBR (make mbr, install bootcode and dd
 if=/FreeBSD-10.0-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img of=/dev/da4s1)...

 What make me think, that this is impossible, that "Boot menu" (called with
 ESC button on ealry boot stage) shows "USB Optical drive" and "USB Hard
 Drive" in any of these cases. BIOS messages shows USB stick detected
 properly, but boot menuy shows these two items, even if there is no USB
 flash!

JHS> Maybe the laptop also has a pcmcia card (for eg a cdrom) or an
JHS> ethernet pxe boot ?
  PXE boot should be my next stop in this battle! I could open case
 (unscrew about 20 screws) and attach HDD to desktop, but it looks not a
 fair play! :)))

-- 
// Black Lion AKA Lev Serebryakov <lev at FreeBSD.org>