Re: Fwd: Booting USB Flash

[Andrew Ball <aball%students.prairiestate.edu@localhost>]

Hello Andreas,

    I used fdisk to look at the installation images (perhaps
the first I've run fdisk against an ordinary file). They all
looked good with the partition marked as active. I was going
to do the same against a flash drive after writing the image
to it but to make sure things were clean I first used dd to
write zeros to every sector on the USB flash drive.  The
imaged flash drive looked ok in fdisk so I thought I'd try
booting the i386 board from it.  It worked and I now have a
working NetBSD/i386 8.0 machine.

    Either I did it wrong the other day, I used a bad USB
flash drive or there was something left on the flash drive
that threw the computer off in terms of bootability.  Either
way, thanks for the help and I apologise for the noise.

-Andy Ball

On Tue, Jan 29, 2019 at 4:03 AM Andreas Gustafsson <gson%gson.org@localhost> wrote:
>
> Andrew,
>
> You wrote:
> > SHA512 (NetBSD-8.0-i386-install.img.gz) = 0494ae2e160b757e79cd6b8bff8f2834d86dac
> [...]
> > dd if=NetBSD-8.0-i386-install.img of=/dev/rsd0d bs=8192 progress=2080
>
> This all looks fine.
>
> I downloded NetBSD-8.0-i386-install.img.gz, verified the SHA512,
> wrote it to a USB stick using the above command, and it booted
> successfully on a real 32-bit PC (modulo PR 53192).  It also boots
> successfully with
>
>   qemu-system-i386 -snapshot -hda NetBSD-8.0-i386-install.img
>
> modulo some minor confusion about the root device which should be
> fixed in -current.
> --
> Andreas Gustafsson, gson%gson.org@localhost