# Creating a 8.2 FreeBSD USB boot disk in OS X 10.6



## thanatos (Nov 30, 2011)

Hey all. I'm currently having problems creating a boot disk via disk utility on my 1,1 macbook running snow leopard in hopes of installing and dual booting FreeBSD 8.2. My cd drive is dead therefore a USB install is preferred. I've got the usb cleaned and erased fully, running an MS-FAT partition as seen upon a *diskutil list*

```
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *8.0 GB disk1
1: DOS_FAT_32 UNTITLED 1 8.0 GB disk1s1
```
To copy the .img (having unmounted the drive prior) file I'm running the dd command in terminal with a buffer speed of 64.

[CMD=]sudo dd if=FreeBSD-8.2-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img of=/dev/disk1 bs=64k[/cmd]

Upon finishing all seems well. Booting via USB I get the bootloader screen and choose 'windows' to where Im prompted that the "Operating System is missing". Leaving me at a loss of ideas. Any input at this point would be MUCH APPRECIATED LADS!

-thanatos


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## SirDice (Nov 30, 2011)

thanatos said:
			
		

> and the dd command and buffer speed im using:
> 
> sudo dd if=FreeBSD-8.2-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img of=/dev/disk1 bs=64k



bs is not the buffer speed, it's the block size.


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## thanatos (Nov 30, 2011)

That would be correct, thanks for the correction Dice.

With that aside and upon reading that my mac will not ultimately boot via USB on a stick formatted with DOS_FAT_32, what can are my options at this point ? Reformatting the stick with Extended Journaled and dd'ing the img again ?


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## SirDice (Nov 30, 2011)

thanatos said:
			
		

> Reformatting the stick with Extended Journaled and dd'ing the img again ?


No, that would be futile. The dd(1) writes a complete image, including the filesystem. So it doesn't matter what was on the stick, after it has been overwritten with the image it will contain a partition with an UFS filesystem on it.


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