# bootonly, mini-memstick.



## vince66 (Aug 26, 2018)

Hello gang !

please, can you detail the use of the bootonly.iso and mini-memstick.img ?

The Handbook is not very complete about them.

Thanks in advance


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## SirDice (Aug 27, 2018)

It's right there, on the announcement page:

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.2R/announce.html


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## scottro (Aug 27, 2018)

The mini-memstick and boot-only installation mediea expects that you'll be able to connect to a FreeBSD ftp server through a network and pull down the files needed for installation.  In contrast, the memstick (not mini-memstick) image has the needed files so you could do an install even if unable to reach a FreeBSD ftp server.


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## vince66 (Aug 27, 2018)

SirDice said:


> It's right there, on the announcement page:



OK.
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memstick        
This can be written to an USB memory stick (flash drive) and used to do an install on machines capable of booting off USB drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. There are no pre-built packages.

As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this should work:

          # dd if=FreeBSD-11.2-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1m conv=sync

___________________________________________

Please, can you tell me how can I make/create a .img of the FreeBSD.
memstick.img is right for me, but I need to add some packages to the memstick.img. How can I do ?
Thanks in advance.


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## Beastie (Aug 28, 2018)

vince66 said:


> Please, can you tell me how can I make/create a .img of the FreeBSD.
> memstick.img is right for me, but I need to add some packages to the memstick.img. How can I do ?


Use mdconfig(8). Check the EXAMPLE section near the end. It shows all you need to do to create and mount a file-backed device. When that's done, you simply copy the .txz files you want and unmount it.


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## vince66 (Aug 28, 2018)

Beastie said:


> Use mdconfig(8). Check the EXAMPLE section near the end. It shows all you need to do to create and mount a file-backed device. When that's done, you simply copy the .txz files you want and unmount it.



Beastie,

let me try ... in any case thanks very much !!!!
Surely it will be another test devoted to open the street to create a most hardware agnostic bootable FreeBSD version.


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