freebsd-bootonly-make

How to create a PXE-bootable disk image of the FreeBSD "bootonly" install ISO

Based on an e-mail by Shaun Reitan on the SYSLINUX mailing list in October 2005.

The general idea:

• transform the small "bootonly" ISO (which is intended to fetch all OS files over the network) into a PXE-bootable harddisk image
• make the first installation CD available on the network e.g. through NFS

This howto only explains how to create the PXE-bootable image.

• Download the "bootonly" installation ISO (about 25MB for FreeBSD 6.2)

e.g.

• If case you haven't got a FreeBSD system running already, install BSD somewhere temporarily using the first installation ISO (e.g. in VMWare).

• Copy the "bootonly" ISO to your BSD system, e.g. using scp or WinSCP.

• Find out how large you need to create your disk image:

   # ls -al *.iso
   -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  25444352 Apr 16 15:44 6.2-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso

• Create a file of the appropriate size (make it a little larger to account for differences in block size, file system overhead etc.):

   # dd if=/dev/zero of=6.2-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.img bs=1k count=26000
   26000+0 records in
   26000+0 records out
   26624000 bytes transferred in 1.404435 secs (18957091 bytes/sec)

   # ls -al *.iso *.img
   -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  26624000 Apr 27 03:28 6.2-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.img
   -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  25444352 Apr 16 15:44 6.2-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso

• Attach this image file as a memory disk:

   # mdconfig -a -t vnode -f 6.2-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.img -u 0

• Write a BSD label with boot code to it:

   # bsdlabel -w -B md0 auto

• And create a filesystem on it (BSD uses ufs):

   # newfs -m 0 md0a
   Warning: changing optimization to space because minfree is less than 8%
   /dev/md0a: 25.4MB (51984 sectors) block size 16384, fragment size 2048
           using 4 cylinder groups of 6.36MB, 407 blks, 832 inodes.
   super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
    160, 13184, 26208, 39232

• Create a mount point and mount this "memory disk" device (attached to the image file):

   # mkdir /tmp/img
   # mount /dev/md0a /tmp/img
   # df /tmp/img
   Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity  Mounted on
   /dev/md0a      24950    4 24946     0%    /tmp/img

• Create another mount point and mount the ISO file on it through another md device:

   # mkdir /tmp/iso
   # mdconfig -a -t vnode -f 6.2-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso -u 1
   # mount_cd9660 /dev/md1 /tmp/iso
   # df /tmp/iso
   Filesystem 1K-blocks  Used Avail Capacity  Mounted on
   /dev/md1       24848 24848     0   100%    /tmp/iso

• Copy the ISO contents to the new disk image file:

   # cd /tmp/img/
   # cp -r /tmp/iso/* .
   # ls -al
   total 12
   drwxr-xr-x  4 root  wheel      512 Apr 27 03:40 .
   drwxrwxrwt  8 root  wheel      512 Apr 27 03:36 ..
   drwxrwxr-x  2 root  operator   512 Apr 27 03:35 .snap
   dr-xr-xr-x  5 root  wheel      512 Apr 27 03:40 boot
   -r--r--r--  1 root  wheel     2048 Apr 27 03:40 boot.catalog
   -r--r--r--  1 root  wheel       25 Apr 27 03:40 cdrom.inf

• Unmount and detach all md devices:

   # cd
   # umount /tmp/img /tmp/iso
   # mdconfig -d -u 0
   # mdconfig -d -u 1

• We're done. Copy the .img file to your tftp server.

   # ls -al *.img *.iso
   -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  26624000 Apr 27 03:41 6.2-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.img
   -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  25444352 Apr 16 15:44 6.2-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso

• And add something similar to this to your pxelinux.cfg/default file:

   label freebsd62
       kernel memdisk
       append initrd=images/freebsd/6.2-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.img harddisk