OpenBSD Journal

Call for Testing: USB Installation Images

Contributed by tbert on from the twiddling-your-thumb-drives dept.

Chris Cappuccio (chris@) announced the need for testing USB installer images on tech@:

Here are some potential USB installer images for OpenBSD/amd64 5.5

http://www.nmedia.net/chris/install55.fs
http://www.nmedia.net/chris/miniroot55.fs

The install55.fs contains full installation packages. The miniroot55.fs is a ramdisk-kernel only (for network installation or troubleshooting.)

Please test either on as many amd64 machines as you can with any USB flash and any USB-CF adapters that you have.

Report failures and success of each image ASAP. Test as many flash types (USB, CF-USB, old USB, new USB...) as you can.

SPECIFICALLY, IF you have a boot failure, I need to see the dmesg output (and the fdisk and disklabel output from the machine if possible to boot it another way). Any error messages displayed from the boot blocks or BIOS are also essential.

A follow-up email gives the instructions for creating the installation media:

The installation entails:

dd if=miniroot55.fs of=/dev/rsd2c

Assuming your USB key is identified as 'sd2' after you plug it in (Be careful not to write over a system disk!)

Also you can use physdiskwrite or other tools on Windows or other platforms. All tests are welcome.

As the man says, download, install, and report. If you want to make USB installer images a regular offering, your efforts are required.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (70.167.25.99) on

    YES!!! Happy days! I'll test this out ASAP. :-)

  2. By sneaker (sneaker) sneaker@noahpugsley.net on

    Followup number 2: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=139364642212486&w=2


    Chris Cappuccio via openbsd.org

    7:59 PM (2 hours ago)

    to tech
    Chris Cappuccio [chris@nmedia.net] wrote:
    > The installation entails:
    >
    > dd if=miniroot55.fs of=/dev/rsd2c
    >

    Actually, for the install55.fs image, you want to specify a block size,
    (or wait ages.)

    dd if=install55.fs of=/dev/rsd2c bs=1m

    It's something like 20x faster to specify a block size on some of mine.

    The 512 byte default block size is so small, it must cause the USB key
    to re-write the same physical block multiple times. These devices have
    underlying blocks of 4K and larger.

  3. By Chris Cappuccio (chriscappuccio) chris@nmedia.net on http://www.nmedia.net/chris/

    The changes to fdisk and /usr/src/distrib are now committed and the latest snapshot includes miniroot55.fs and install55.fs. You can download from http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/i386/ and http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/amd64/

    For other reasons, the signature files are incomplete so it spits out an error during install. The same is true for install55.iso.

    Comments
    1. By thomasw_ (108.172.20.101) on

      > The changes to fdisk and /usr/src/distrib are now committed and the latest snapshot includes miniroot55.fs and install55.fs. You can download from http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/i386/ and http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/amd64/
      >
      > For other reasons, the signature files are incomplete so it spits out an error during install. The same is true for install55.iso.

      Ok,I installed today's i386 snapshot using the new *.fs with a usb on my t43 thinkpad. It did give the sig error you indicate, but other than that, it rocked. Thanks heaps Chris and all you hardcore devs for sharing your joy :) btw today's snapshot seems particularly good.

    2. By Laurence Rochfort (80.0.78.224) laurence.rochfort@gmail.com on

      > The changes to fdisk and /usr/src/distrib are now committed and the latest snapshot includes miniroot55.fs and install55.fs. You can download from http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/i386/ and http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/amd64/
      >
      > For other reasons, the signature files are incomplete so it spits out an error during install. The same is true for install55.iso.

      I take it the images in snapshot are for -current and those in the normal architecture directories are just 5.5?

      Apart from the signature issue that others described, it all installed without a hitch on an amd64 Intel chipset system.

      dmesg to follow.

  4. By Laurence Rochfort (lrochfort) laurence.rochfort@gmail.com on

    Will USB sticks be made available for purchase in the same way as CDs?

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