Success booting PC-BSD through USB flash drive

Hahaha. When I wrote my previous post, I found that I possibly made a mistake when copying the IMG image to USB pendrive. Yes, I used “dd” incorrectly because I didn’t know how to use it exactly.

This was how I used “dd” in Linux:

dd if=PC-BSD-7.1.1-x86.img of=/dev/sdb1 bs=1024

Now, the problem was the “/dev/sdb1”. We should use “/dev/sdb” instead of “/dev/sdb1”. This is because “sdb1” indicates the partition, yet “sdb” indicates the drive. And I should copy (dd) the whole file system and data of IMG to the drive, not to the partition. That was why, after I used the statement above, I still found that my pendrive was in FAT32 format.

So, just now I tried the following statement:

dd if=PC-BSD-7.1.1-x86.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1024

Then, I successfully booting PC-BSD. Besides that, the file system from “fdisk -l” shows that the drive is in FreeBSD format. So, I realised that, the booting of an OS also depends on the file system. If I set the boot sector correctly, and the boot loader also set correctly, but the file system is different, then the booting will fail.

That is why, syslinux targets on FAT32 and isolinux targets on ISO filesystem. Though Linux kernel for the booting is already in the drive, but file system is different will cause the booting failed. So, syslinux project is targeted to solve the file system problem for booting the OS.

After I successfully booting in PC-BSD. But I decided not to install it. Because the screen resolution is too big for my netbook. @_@

Note: Remember backup USB pendrive data before “dd”, cause data will be removed.