Installation problem: invalid slice

[technossomy]

When installing FreeBSD from CD onto a USB stick and reboot the computer, the command line says: "Invalid slice". Why is this message given, even though the installation was completed successfully?

[sarumont]

There's no more info than that message? At what point in the boot sequence do you get that?

[technossomy]

This is at the boot screen. All or most hardware is detected and the OS is about to be read.

Hope this helps

[sarumont]

That doesn't really help. That's a very useless error message.

Have you tried re-installing onto that flash disk? It sounds like the disklabel is corrupt, but it probably wouldn't have finished installing were that the case... :-\

[technossomy]

Frankly, I have tried many times, mostly DesktopBSD (3 or 4 times), sometimes PC-BSD (twice) and DragonflyBSD (once). Also, I have used multiple USB sticks with varying capacity (2, 4 and 8 GB).

[sarumont]

Have you tried grub?

Re: Can't boot freebsd from usb device - Invalid slice

[technossomy]

I have retried several times to do a reinstall. Maybe I am missing something. How do I install GRUB on a machine that will not boot into the OS? There is no GRUB installation prior to BSD installation. There is no menu either that allows me to boot into GRUB. Please advise.

[sarumont]

Well, you'd have to install grub via a Linux live CD or something. You'll need a small, Linux FS partition (ext2, ext3, etc.) for the grub stuff to live on. (note: grub may support booting straight from a BSD disklabel/ufs partition, but I've never looked at that). This won't need to hold much, so a 20-30 MB partition should be more than large enough. The grub.conf manpage (or maybe GNU info page...) has the relevant configuration snippet for booting to FreeBSD.

[technossomy]

Thanks again for your help. I just noticed that the latest FreeBSD release version 6.4 offers booting from USB in base. Seems that given what is involved, a less encumbered approach is to upgrade to that version once it is official.