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Create a bootable FreeBSD 8.0 USB memory stick

Why waste a CD when you can install your favourite distro straight off a USB memory stick? Here's how it's done using Ubuntu.

FreeBSD now makes available a memory stick (or USB key or pen drive) image so you can install the operating system from a solid state flash drive, rather than going to the trouble of burning it to disc. Here's what you need to do.

1. Download the memory stick image

Visit the FreeBSD site and navigate to one of the FTP download servers to find the images for the architecture of your machine. I'm installing to a Quad Core QX6800 based machine, so I want the AMD64 version.

There are lots of different releases available. The latest stable release is 8.0, so I'm going for that. The file to download is called 8.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img. It's about 996 MB, so it may take a while to arrive.

2. Write the image to your USB drive

The manual way of doing this would be to use the dd command. However, I'm using Ubuntu and it provides a really nice little GUI tool called 'USB Startup Disk Creator' which is stored at System > Administration. Start the application and click the 'Other' button beneath the field to 'Select source image'.

When you've clicked the 'Other...' button you'll get a new dialogue to allow you to select the source image. You'll need to navigate to the directory you downloaded the image file to and change the dropdown menu setting from CD images to Disk images, then select the 8.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img file.

Once you've selected that, you'll probably want to format your drive (click the 'format' button) and then copy the image to the disk using the 'Make Startup Disk' button.

Then you'll need to sit back and wait for ten minutes (depending on the speed of your USB drive) for the image to be written to disk.

3. Boot the machine from your USB drive

Eventually, you'll get a message telling you that the image has been written to disk. You can now unmount the flash drive, stick it in the machine you want to install FreeBSD upon and set the BIOS to boot from the flash drive.

It should then install directly from the flash drive, without the need for the CD. You can use the same procedure with any Linux ISO either to speed up the install process, save money/the environment or install on machines that lack a CD or DVD drive.

If you're using another OS and want to do it manually, simply insert your USB drive and enter df in a shell to determine the location it is mounted at (mine was /dev/sdf) and then issue the following command as root (where /dev/sdf is the location of the USB disk): sudo dd if=8.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/sdf bs=10240 conv=sync