# Image doesn't fit on CD, can't install from USB



## dieselriot (Jul 21, 2021)

I'm trying to install FreeBSD to a machine. I can't find my USB drive right now to report the exact error, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't get the installer to boot from USB on this machine. The motherboard in question is an ECS Geforce6100PM-M2/NVIDIA MCP61.

Current "disc" images are for 900MB CDs, which I haven't seen in a long while. All I have access to currently are regular 700MB CDs. The closest I could find are 11.4 images which are 714MB. The burner software I'm using asks me whether I want to overburn or truncate, I'm not sure if either will work. 

bootonly images won't work for me, because I don't have access to an ethernet cable and my wifi card (DWA-525) isn't supported by the ral driver. I have to install src so I can build the kernel with my own patched ral driver so I can then have access to the internet.

Any ideas?


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## Phishfry (Jul 22, 2021)

dieselriot said:


> NVIDIA MCPxxx


These things have been problems on FreeBSD for quite some time. Nvidia chipsets and disk controller issues.
They were not tremendously popular and bet most are extinct now because low ends brands used them.
I mean we are talking about 13-15 year old hardware.

I would recommend FreeBSD 11.4 and use overburn for the CD. Truncate will mangle.
It does go EOL in a few months so be ready to use `freebsd-update` to bring it current.


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## Phishfry (Jul 22, 2021)

dieselriot said:


> Current "disc" images are for 900MB CDs, which I haven't seen in a long while.


How about never. There was never a 900mb disk. It is a bug in my opinion.
We should not be using overburn on 11.4 and follow optical disk standards produced long ago. Even if slimming is needed.
They need to ditch the compact disk version name or kill it for a DVD version optical disk image.
Putting out a version which will not install onto said medium is wrong and hurts new users.


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## Phishfry (Jul 22, 2021)

What about using the FreeBSD DVD version? Do you have a DVD Burner/Drive?
Last time I bought optical medium DVD blanks are as cheap as CD's.
In the past I used Verbatim 4.7GB purples. Dual layer cost too much back then.
DVD-RW were descent and affordable. Then came the pen drive....
The rest is history.


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## dieselriot (Jul 22, 2021)

I have a DVD burner, but I can't find any blank DVDs for sale in my neighborhood, and I can't go downtown for a few days, so I'll try overburning. I've used FreeBSD on this motherboard for some time without problems, everything seemed to work besides resuming after suspend.



Phishfry said:


> How about never. There was never a 900mb disk.



Actually, albeit rare, they do exist. To be quite honest I'm not sure I ever saw one in person, but I believe people use them to backup sega dreamcast games.


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## diizzy (Jul 22, 2021)

As boring as this may sound you're more or less wasting your time, the hardware is ~15y old and reliability is going to be an issue not to forget power consumption.
Even if you have a fairly powerful CPU (like Athlon 4600+) looking at Geekbench it's still slower than lets say a Rockchip RK3399 SoC (RockPro64).
11.4 is also EOL within a few months - https://www.freebsd.org/security/

As for media, 900Mbytes CD-Rs are out of spec and very few ODDs can actually read and write such media and are usually very dodgy to begin with.
Unless your system is unable to boot from USB it's probably more time efficient to install FreeBSD on another box (AMD64), adjust paths and move it back the original computer.


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## covacat (Jul 22, 2021)

if you find the usb drive try this
download boot only cd iso and, burn it
download memstick image and put it on the usb drive
boot from cd, and drop to the loader prompt
boot -a
when asked for root fs enter ufs:da0p2 or something, not sure how memstick images are partitioned


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## dieselriot (Jul 22, 2021)

diizzy said:


> As boring as this may sound you're more or less wasting your time, the hardware is ~15y old and reliability is going to be an issue not to forget power consumption.


Idk man, I was stuck with a 1.0Ghz laptop for years. As far as I'm concerned this machine is an ultra powerful workstation. The CPU is an OG Phenom 9650. It does everything I need and more, and I see zero reason to upgrade, really. It does any job I throw at it pretty fast and it can run Quake at 160fps, the maximum my crt monitor supports, what more could a man ask for?

I mean it's not like I'm trying something new or venturing into the unknown, this has been my main machine for over a year now and I love everything about it. I just need BSD on a new HDD, that's all.

Besides I'm poor, and if ANY piece of this hardware breaks I can replace it for dirt cheap.

But anyway, I'll try booting from the overburned CD tonight. If that fails I'll try covacat's solution, which really sounds like a solid plan.


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## Phishfry (Jul 22, 2021)

dieselriot said:


> Besides I'm poor, and if ANY piece of this hardware breaks I can replace it for dirt cheap.


I can dig that. I am privileged to have advanced up through the ranks in my field.
I have old gear too.
So ignore any snide comments. It is what it is.
Start at 11.4 from CD and work up though upgrades. That is my advice.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jul 22, 2021)

dieselriot said:


> … I can't find my USB drive right now to report the exact error, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't get the installer to boot from USB …



FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE? 

I'll be interested to see the error. 

Incidentally, there's work in progress to make FreeBSD boot on a broader range of computers:

⚙ D31121 amd64 UEFI boot: stop copying staging area to 2M phys


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## kpedersen (Jul 22, 2021)

It is a bit of a faff but how about boot only .iso and then using an external hard drive / usb stick for the packages?



diizzy said:


> As boring as this may sound you're more or less wasting your time, the hardware is ~15y old and reliability is going to be an issue not to forget power consumption.


FreeBSD by design, supports hardware much older than 15 years.
2005 was mid Windows XP era. Hardware was already very capable and the power consumption still doesn't quite outweigh landfilling the old hardware.

A 900mb iso sounds like a bug. Whilst we could just upscale to a DVD, it is very strange that FreeBSD cannot fit on a CD. Something sounds a little broken there.


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## astyle (Jul 22, 2021)

Phishfry said:


> How about never. There was never a 900mb disk.


A bit of a mis-understanding... 900 MB disk images, not physical disks. I've seen those .iso files on FreeBSD's FTP servers back in the day.


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## eternal_noob (Jul 22, 2021)

Yeah, that's the problem here. Those oversized images would never fit on a physical disk.


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## diizzy (Jul 22, 2021)

kpedersen said:


> It is a bit of a faff but how about boot only .iso and then using an external hard drive / usb stick for the packages?
> 
> 
> FreeBSD by design, supports hardware much older than 15 years.
> ...


I never said it didn't however it's going to be really slow for pretty much anything, I can tell you first hand as my laptop (I only keep it because of the ODD) sports uses an Intel i5-520M CPU which performs pretty much the same as the CPU mentioned and overall experience is quite underwhelming at least if you value any kind of responsiveness and that's with 8Gb of RAM and a fast SSD. As Phishfry mentioned earlier nVidia chipset support was never great (the chipset also had its interesting quriks but that's another story).

If I were to make a guess the CD image is still there because of IPMI, I highly doubt "anyone" burns a physical CD to install FreeBSD as it more or less depends on a network connection anyway if you want to use most applications that aren't in base. While I haven't looked at what is packaged with the DVD image that's probably a much better idea if you want to have a somewhat complete system without going online.

@grahamperrin
There's zero support for UEFI by the hardware listed =)


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## kpedersen (Jul 22, 2021)

diizzy said:


> I can tell you first hand as my laptop (I only keep it because of the ODD) sports uses an Intel i5-520M CPU which performs pretty much the same as the CPU mentioned and overall experience is quite underwhelming at least if you value any kind of responsiveness and that's with 8Gb of RAM and a fast SSD.


Oh right. Well I can't really comment. Most of my laptops are older ThinkPads. The fastest is an Intel i3 from ~2012 and 4gigs ram which I find "good enough" for pretty much everything.

SSDs are great though. I tend to put them in all my old machines (minus the IDE-only ones!)


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## dieselriot (Jul 23, 2021)

grahamperrin said:


> FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE?
> 
> I'll be interested to see the error.


Nope, last time I tried was with 12.2 I think. As soon as I find my damned usb drive I promise I'll post the error.


diizzy said:


> I never said it didn't however it's going to be really slow for pretty much anything, I can tell you first hand as my laptop (I only keep it because of the ODD) sports uses an Intel i5-520M CPU which performs pretty much the same as the CPU mentioned


The CPU you mentioned has 2 cores/4 threads. I don't think its performance can match a true quad core. My CPU can handle heavy web pages well, it can run any game I have interest in playing very well (paired with an equally old, low-end gpu), it can handle full hd videos great, even without hardware acceleration. All software runs great and opens fast. ffmpeg can convert stuff fast and code compiles reasonably fast. Both FreeBSD and Windows XP run extremely fast on it. And it costs less than US$10.

And it's running with 2GB single channel RAM. I could add another stick for dual channel which would make it even faster but honestly haven't felt like I really need it. An SSD would also be cool and probably improve perfomance but they're still VERY expensive where I live.



kpedersen said:


> FreeBSD by design, supports hardware much older than 15 years.
> 2005 was mid Windows XP era. Hardware was already very capable and the power consumption still doesn't quite outweigh landfilling the old hardware.



I agree with this 100%. This processor, for example, was bleeding-edge in 2008. It was supposed to be extremely fast in 2008. Have we really changed the way we use computers so much that now it should be extremely slow? I don't think so, and as far as I'm concerned, it's still very fast.

Same goes for CRT monitors. Most CRT monitors supported full HD back then already, and only now there are monitors that can surpass their picture quality (OLED). But they can cost as much as a car whereas a CRT will go for free to 10 bucks. Can we justify filling landfills with CRTs in the name of power consumption?


Anyway, overburning the 714MB image on a 700MB CD worked and that's that. Thanks for the replies.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jul 23, 2021)

FreeBSD bug 257347 – Outdated directions to use standard optical media (CDs, DVDs) for installation of FreeBSD



diizzy said:


> … what is packaged with the DVD image …



-dvd1.iso contains:

files to install FreeBSD, its source, and the ports collection
popular packages to install a window manager and applications – for a _complete system_.


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## dieselriot (Jul 30, 2021)

grahamperrin said:


> FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE?
> 
> I'll be interested to see the error.





dieselriot said:


> Nope, last time I tried was with 12.2 I think. As soon as I find my damned usb drive I promise I'll post the error.



Here's the error, 13.0-RELEASE memstick img, properly burned with dd to the usb drive:




Also, I successfully installed 13.0-RELEASE by other means, and I've gotta say it's the best version so far. Everything just works (besides my problem with bitmap fonts), 2d and 3d hardware acceleration works wonderfully, kernel hasn't panicked once so far. And suspend/resume WORKS perfectly every time. Never thought I'd see the day where I could tell my machine to sleep, then come back later and it actually wakes up. Never thought this would be fixed for this chipset. Great stuff.


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