Comments on: Convert FreeBSD ISO image for PXE bootstrap

By: Dennis Dulay

Dennis Dulay — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 02:32:06 +0000

This is a great guide!!! I can now add freebsd on our linux pxe server yuhoooo!!!

thanks again!!!

By: Gianpaolo Del Matto

Gianpaolo Del Matto — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 11:25:19 +0000

well, didn’t have time to check this on fbsd 8.1 until now, maybe I get some time eventually.

By: Ilya Evseev

Ilya Evseev — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:13:42 +0000

FreeBSD 8.1.
Boot loader starts ok, but everything dies after selecting any item.
Only “|” is displayed.
“raw” keyword does not help.

By: lop

lop — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:21:32 +0000

when creating the .hd image, after attaching the .hd image to /dev/md1, and trying to fdisk -B -I /dev/md1, i get:

*****Working on /dev/md1*****
fdisk: Class not found

this is on freebsd 8 release i386, using the freebsd 8 release i386 bootonly ISO.

what is wrong ?

By: Flupp

Flupp — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:15:26 +0000

The combination of the boot loader from FreeBSD 7.1 and memdisk out of Syslinux 3.63 crashes during the load of the ACPI module: “loading required module pci ‘apcpi’ autoload failed – no such file or directory”.

The option “raw” to memdisk helped:

LABEL fbsd71
KERNEL memdisk
APPEND initrd=fbsd71.hd harddisk raw

HTH and thanks for this great Howto!

Beat

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:10:57 +0000

Is there a way possible to automate this process?
I want to make an auto installer with custom install.cfg each time.

By: valiy

valiy — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:26:41 +0000

#!/bin/sh
mkdir build
mkdir build/iso.mnt
mkdir build/hd.mnt
mkdir build/mfs.mnt
MD_ISO=`mdconfig -a -t vnode -f $1`
mount_cd9660 /dev/${MD_ISO} build/iso.mnt
IMG_SIZE=`ls -l $1 | awk ‘{print $5}’`
dd if=/dev/zero of=$2 bs=`expr ${IMG_SIZE} + 36354048` count=1
#dd if=/dev/zero of=$2 bs=${IMG_SIZE} count=1
MD_IMG=`mdconfig -a -t vnode -f $2`
fdisk -B -b build/iso.mnt/boot/mbr -I /dev/${MD_IMG}
bsdlabel -B -b build/iso.mnt/boot/boot -w /dev/${MD_IMG}
newfs -O1 -m 0 /dev/${MD_IMG}a
mount /dev/${MD_IMG}a build/hd.mnt
cp -r build/iso.mnt/* build/hd.mnt/
cp -r build/iso.mnt/boot/kernel/* build/hd.mnt/boot/modules/
umount build/hd.mnt
mdconfig -d -u ${MD_IMG}
umount build/iso.mnt
mdconfig -d -u ${MD_ISO}
rm -rf build

By: chrisb

chrisb — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 22:20:28 +0000

Nice article. I’m learning a lot.

By: free image host

free image host — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:55:16 +0000

Thanks a lot for this article

By: Gianpaolo Del Matto

Gianpaolo Del Matto — Wed, 30 May 2007 12:45:54 +0000

FreeBSD’s stock setup disks are missing /etc (/etc/rc* in particular) because it’s simply not required for the setup.
sysinstall assumes control in favor to init and does the appropriate tasks, nothing more, nothing less.

It can therefore not be compared with a full-fledged system because it basically lacks everything else.

This also means that if you want to do some scripted actions you will have to create your own boot disk with full-fledged /etc/ and /sbin/init or rely on sysinstall’s builtin exec functions otherwise.

The latter one is not so sophisicated as sysinstall can only execute commands without arguments.
They also run completely detached from the terminal so they may be completely non-interactive only.

If you’re going the sysinstall way, an appropriate command in ‘install.cfg’ would be:

command=’/path/to/scriptname.sh’
system

All commands placed on a stock mfs-root should preferrably be statically linked to avoid issues with missing libraries. Some of them may still not work if they fail to allocate a virtual terminal.

As a sidenote: FreeBSD selects init from the kern.init_path sysctl, which defaults to “/sbin/init:/sbin/oinit:/sbin/init.bak:/stand/sysinstall”.