Solved FreeBSD on MSI Wind 100

[Jörg Preiß]

Hi all,

I've seen that some of you already managed to install FreeBSD on a Wind machine. But I do not even get it to boot.

I tried both, the DVD and the memory stick image. I wrote it to stick with dd, but also with unetbootin. But they do not appear in the list of bootable devices. The only time I saw at least the main boot menu was when I inserted my 64 bit stick. But of course, it had no matching kernel.

So, what could be the problem here?

Regards

 

[SirDice]

The only time I saw at least the main boot menu was when I inserted my 64 bit stick. But of course, it had no matching kernel.

If this one actually boots I really can't see a reason why the i386 version doesn't. Both use the same bootloader code. Perhaps the image you downloaded is corrupt? Did you verify the checksum?

 

[Jörg Preiß]

Mmmh... I think the working stick was an installation directly to the stick.
From a german wiki, I took the following lines while running the installer

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 count=2
fdisk -BI /dev/da0
bsdlabel -B -w da0s1
newfs -U -L FBSDUSB /dev/da0s1a
mount /dev/da0s1a /mnt

So obviously this is not the same as dd-ing the memory stick.

I downloaded the images to different computers, I don't think they were all broken. No, I didn't verify the checksum.

 

[wblock@]

I tried both, the DVD and the memory stick image. I wrote it to stick with dd, but also with unetbootin.

The stock memory stick images are bsdlabel "dangerously dedicated", with no MBR. It's possible this machine requires an actual MBR.

I would not trust unetbootin to produce a working FreeBSD image. Many people have tried and reported here that it didn't work.

 

[Jörg Preiß]

It's possible this machine requires an actual MBR.

But then the dd-ing of the dvd iso should have been working, shouldn't it?
In the setup, I can choose the order of USB floppy and USB drive, so an MBR shouldn't be needed.

Anyway, maybe I'll try to boot via network. It's somethin I'll always wanted to try out.

 

[ASX]

But then the dd-ing of the dvd iso should have been working, shouldn't it?

no, FreeBSD provide both .iso images to be remasterd on optical media and .img images to be dd'ed to USB sticks. The difference is in the boot code, each contain the one necessary for a specific media.

 

[Jörg Preiß]

Got it - it was the stick. I created another one with the usb disk creator from Ubuntu - boots. This time with the minimal image to save time. Great! Now the adventure can start...