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Installing FreeBSD from USB (created using Windows)

Be careful. You’re creating a FreeBSD boot image using Windows. It’s sometimes difficult to see which hard disk you’re writing to. See here:
Writing FreeBSD memstick.img to a USB drive in Windows « Koitsu’s Blog

Download dd for Windows here: chrysocome.net – download. I chose beta 0.6.3. Unzip it, and take a look at the options:


dd [bs=SIZE] [count=BLOCKS] [if=FILE] [of=FILE] [seek=BLOCKS] [skip=BLOCKS] [–s SIZE and BLOCKS may have one of the following suffix:
k = 1024
M = 1048576
G = 1073741824
default block size (bs) is 512 bytes
skip specifies the starting offset of the input file (if)
seek specifies the starting offset of the output file (of)

I had to run CMD and then dd as administrator (on Windows 7). Unless I did that, I couldn’t see the NT Block Device Objects. When I ran as administrator, i got the following (in addition to other outputs):


NT Block Device Objects
\\?\Device\CdRom0
size is 2147483647 bytes
\\?\Device\CdRom1
size is 2147483647 bytes
\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk0\DR0
Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512
size is 80000000000 bytes
\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition1
link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume1
\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition2
link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume2
\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk1\DR1
Fixed hard disk media. Block size = 512
size is 250000000000 bytes
\\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition1
link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume3
\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk2\DR2
\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition1
link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume4
\\?\Device\Harddisk3\Partition0
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk3\DR6
Removable media other than floppy. Block size = 512
size is 4007657472 bytes
\\?\Device\Harddisk3\Partition1
link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume8
Removable media other than floppy. Block size = 512
size is 25600000 bytes

Then, I ran the dd command. I got a file permission error problem. I went over to the Windows volume manager and formatted the drive I was interested in. Windows formatting of the drive failed, too. It created a partition with a size of 24MB. After that, though, I could run dd:


D:\Users\Poojan\Downloads\dd-0.6beta3>dd bs=10240 if=..\8.1-RELEASE-amd64-all\FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=\\?\Device\H
arddisk3\Partition0 –progress
rawwrite dd for windows version 0.6beta3.
Written by John Newbigin <jn@it.swin.edu.au>
This program is covered by terms of the GPL Version 2.

It has been running for quite a while. It’s up to a count of 470,000,000 right now.

After about 30 minutes, it’s finally done:

D:\Users\Poojan\Downloads\dd-0.6beta3>dd bs=10240 if=..\8.1-RELEASE-amd64-all\FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=\\?\Device\H
arddisk3\Partition0 –progress
rawwrite dd for windows version 0.6beta3.
Written by John Newbigin <jn@it.swin.edu.au>
This program is covered by terms of the GPL Version 2.

1,075,384,320 105018+0 records in
105018+0 records out

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