freebsd stable - Jan 2014 - Did somebody boot old Sony Vaio laptop from FreeBSD memstick successfully?

Hello, All.

 I'm trying to install FreeBSD 10-R (i386) on old Sony Vaio laptop (it is
VGN-SZ340P, Merom generation of Core2, ~2007).

 It allows to select "USB Hard drive" or "USB Optical Drive"
as boot device,
but it writes "No operating system" in both cases.

  I've checked memstick and found, that it doesn't have MBR (it looks
like
/dev/da4a). I've added MBR, one slice, mbr bootcode, make this slice
active, and dump memstick image to /dev/da4s1. My desktop boots from this
memstick without problems, laptop says "No boot code".

 Unfortunately, this Laptop has broken CD-ROM (and it looks like by DVD-RW
drive in desktop is disgunctional too, I've tried to do something with it 4
years ago).

 Maybe, somebody has experience of booting such old Sony Vaio from FreeBSD
memstick and here is some trick to do this?

-- 
// Black Lion AKA Lev Serebryakov <lev at FreeBSD.org>

Quoting Lev Serebryakov <lev at FreeBSD.org>:
> Hello, All.
>
>  I'm trying to install FreeBSD 10-R (i386) on old Sony Vaio laptop (it
is
> VGN-SZ340P, Merom generation of Core2, ~2007).
>
>  It allows to select "USB Hard drive" or "USB Optical
Drive" as boot device,
> but it writes "No operating system" in both cases.
>
>   I've checked memstick and found, that it doesn't have MBR (it
looks like
> /dev/da4a). I've added MBR, one slice, mbr bootcode, make this slice
> active, and dump memstick image to /dev/da4s1. My desktop boots from this
> memstick without problems, laptop says "No boot code".
>
>  Unfortunately, this Laptop has broken CD-ROM (and it looks like by DVD-RW
> drive in desktop is disgunctional too, I've tried to do something with
it 4
> years ago).
>
>  Maybe, somebody has experience of booting such old Sony Vaio from FreeBSD
> memstick and here is some trick to do this?
Not sure about a Vaio, but I have many machines that will not boot  
from larger memory sticks.

Creating a 1G partion on a big stick and dd-ing onto that works for  
those machines.

HTH,
Bap
>
> --
> // Black Lion AKA Lev Serebryakov <lev at FreeBSD.org>
>
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On Tue, 28 Jan 2014, Lev Serebryakov wrote:
> Hello, All.
>
> I'm trying to install FreeBSD 10-R (i386) on old Sony Vaio laptop (it
is
> VGN-SZ340P, Merom generation of Core2, ~2007).
>
> It allows to select "USB Hard drive" or "USB Optical
Drive" as boot device,
> but it writes "No operating system" in both cases.
>
>  I've checked memstick and found, that it doesn't have MBR (it
looks like
> /dev/da4a). I've added MBR, one slice, mbr bootcode, make this slice
> active, and dump memstick image to /dev/da4s1. My desktop boots from this
> memstick without problems, laptop says "No boot code".
On MBR/BSDlabel, a second chunk of bootcode must be written inside the 
BSD partition also.  Nicolas Geniteau just posted this very nice 
procedure for converting a memory stick to MBR/BSDlabel.  I have not 
tried it yet, but it does write that additional bootcode.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2014-January/255841.html