How I Created a Bootable USB in PC-BSD

I finally got my Eee PC back from the vendors after almost a month. I had problems with its keyboard so I had them fix it as it was still under warranty. And I promised myself that once I get it back, I will try out Meego OS for Netbooks. But that’s for another post.

Anyway, I wanted to write down how I created a bootable USB using PC-BSD, CLI style! Okay, I admit, the CLI scares the shit out of me. I would have used UNetbootin or usb-imagewriter had they been existing as a PBI or a package/port. But as luck would have it, I couldn’t find either of those in FreshPorts as of this writing so I ended up via CLI.

Thanks to this guide, I was able to create one by following the Command Line alternative portion of the guide. It’s sort of the old way of doing things but I just got to try it out now. You may know how to use it, but if you’re a newbie like me, then it’s handy for when GUI .img to USB apps don’t exist for your system.

So first I go to Konsole and do a su to get root priviledges (I don’t know if this is necessary but just to be sure). And then I check what device my USB is mounted on.

root@pcbsd# dmesg | tail -20

And then all this stuff comes to screen. Take note of the last 8 lines.

drm0: \ on vgapci0 info: [drm] MSI enabled 1 message(s) vgapci0: child drm0 requested pci_enable_busmaster info: [drm] AGP at 0xe0000000 256MB info: [drm] Initialized i915 1.6.0 20080730 drm0: [ITHREAD] pid 91766 (npviewer.bin), uid 1001: exited on signal 5 wlan0: link state changed to DOWN lagg0: link state changed to DOWN wlan0: link state changed to UP lagg0: link state changed to UP pid 26103 (npviewer.bin), uid 1001: exited on signal 11 ugen2.2: \ at usbus2 umass0: \ on usbus2 umass0:  SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0x0000 umass0:2:0:-1: Attached to scbus2 da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0 da0: \ Removable Direct Access SCSI-2 device da0: 40.000MB/s transfers da0: 984MB (2015232 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 984C)

And with that, the device is on da0. So now we need to unmount the USB, if it’s mounted, so we can proceed with the creation of the bootable USB.

root@pcbsd# umount /dev/da0

Make sure that you are on the right directory where the .img file is. Then start the copying.

root@pcbsd# dd if=meego-netbook-chromium-ia32-1.0-20100524.1.img of=/dev/da0 1589248+0 records in 1589248+0 records out 813694976 bytes transferred in 49207.132521 secs (16536 bytes/sec)

I must say it takes a lot of time to create a bootable USB using this technique. Once everything is done, you will get some sort of stats.

Posted via email from Plain Rice