How to write FreeBSD image to USB flash drive
Assuming you are using dd within FreeBSD or Linux:
Using Linux:
1) umount /dev/sdb
If your USB stick is under /dev/sdb
2) dd if=FreeBSD-10.3-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/sdb bs=10240
Using (Free)BSD:
1) umount /dev/da0
If your USB stick is under /dev/da0
2) dd if=FreeBSD-10.3-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1m
Please note the of=/dev/sdb
argument as you are supposed to write to the whole stick instead of its first partition.
The same is true of of=/dev/da0
. But please note that da
is typically the prefix for USB port devices on (Free)BSD. Which means that it might just as well be da1
. So make sure to check beforehand. :)
Easiest way would be to compare the results of an ls /dev
before and after plugging/unplugging your flash drive/USB stick.
3) Now reboot and choose the USB stick as the boot option.
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Comments
-
gnu over 1 year
I am trying to write
FreeBSD-10.3-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img
to a USB flash drive, in the hopes of installing FreeBSD on an x64 computer in my house. Here is the image:ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/10.3/
.I have searched up how to write
.img
files to a USB flash drive, with most sites saying to use Unetbootin, Startup Disk Creator, or the dd command. When I plugged in and selected the flash drive after using Unetbootin, I received the message "Missing operating system". With Disk Creator, I received a message telling me that Disk Creator couldn't write the image to the flash drive.As for the dd command, I used this:
dd if=FreeBSD-10.3-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/sdb1 bs=10240 conv=sync
, which I got from here and here. The command writes a bunch of garbage files to my flash drive, instead of the contents of the FreeBSD image (which I assume wouldn't be garbage files).How should I go about writing FreeBSD to the flash drive and installing it to my computer, given that these options didn't work?
-
lucidbrot over 7 yearsThanks for mentioning the part about sdb instead of sdb! For anybody using cygwin for this, make sure you started cygwin as administrator. you can find out what /dev/sdb or similar you should use with
cat /proc/partitions
. To see if dd is making progress, appendstatus=progress
to the dd command.