# FreeBSD 8 USB Installation hangs



## agottem (Dec 28, 2009)

I've created a bootable USB key to install FreeBSD 8 onto an eeePC 901.  I created the USB key from Ubuntu, using the following commands:


```
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=128M
dd if=/path/to/memstickfile.img of=/dev/sdc bs=10240 conv=sync
```


I put the USB key into the eee PC, and had it boot from it.  Almost immediately after the BIOS initializes and boots from the USB key, the screen goes blank (except for a flashing cursor in the upper left corner), and nothing else happens.  The USB key LED flickers a few times after BIOS initialization (indicating some IO operations), but that's it.

Any ideas what might be going on here?


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## taobeastie (Jan 8, 2010)

Did you get an answer to this, yet?

Try:

```
dd if=/path/to/memstickfile.img of=/dev/sd? bs=512
```

It may take a little longer to dd the image, but a block size of 512 seems to be the trick when it comes to my installation flash drive (4GB PNY)...

(Using block size of 16k, which is what I would normally do for a hard drive, etc, I seemed to get errors, when using Linux distros to image...)

I hope this helps...

--TaoBeastie


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## agottem (Jan 15, 2010)

Thanks for the response.  I gave it a try, unfortunately, it ended with the same results.


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