Unable to make a bootable USB flash drive with GhostBSD 19.04 or 19.09

Questions about the installation of FreeBSD
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NeverSimple
Posts: 40
Joined: Sun Aug 20, 2017 10:08 am

Unable to make a bootable USB flash drive with GhostBSD 19.04 or 19.09

Post by NeverSimple »

I first tried dd'ing a downloaded 19.04 ISO on my GhostBSD 11.2 laptop. No error message, disk seems to be written ok. Laptop does not want to boot from it, drive flashes once, then gets ignored, laptop boots to installed OS (I explicitely selected the USB flash drive as boot device). repeating the process only gives the same result.

Same thing with a different drive (other brand, other size). So i tried Windows whith 'Balena Etcher', 'Win32diskImager' and 'Rufus' to write the drive, none gave me a bootable disk, same process as above, no errors during writing.

As a sanity check, I downloaded two Linux ISO's, Manjaro and MX Linux. Both worked perfectly on both USB flash drives. Used 'Balena Etcher' to write the ISO, laptop boots fine from either.

I then downloaded the dev 19.09 ISO to see if I had better luck, but the problem remains: no bootable disk. This time I also tried to use dd from MX linux, also no bootable drive from that.

During the whole thing I installed MX Linux, thinking it would be easy to get back to GhostBSD... and I really want to..

Does anyone know why this seems to be so hard?

EDIT: I did check the SHA256 hash and even downloaded the whole ISO again.
dismas
Posts: 20
Joined: Mon Jan 14, 2019 9:17 am

Re: Unable to make a bootable USB flash drive with GhostBSD 19.04 or 19.09

Post by dismas »

Hello,
I don't know why but I never succeed in installing GhostBSD from a USB stick.
Burn the ISO if you can, it will work better.
Regards.
:arrow: Sorry for my bad English : I'm French
NeverSimple
Posts: 40
Joined: Sun Aug 20, 2017 10:08 am

Re: Unable to make a bootable USB flash drive with GhostBSD 19.04 or 19.09

Post by NeverSimple »

That was just what I was trying to avoid... No optical drive in the HP EliteBook, i would have to get an USB attached drive.

The 'hybrid' ISO's from Ghost have always been a difficult to get going, don't no why. No linux distro I ever tried seem to have that problem.

If I have to install from DVD (like a Neanderthaler... :mrgreen: ) I'll just wait for the 19.09 release, or whatever version number will be the next release, to avoid having to 'burn' multiple disks.
NeverSimple
Posts: 40
Joined: Sun Aug 20, 2017 10:08 am

Re: Unable to make a bootable USB flash drive with GhostBSD 19.04 or 19.09

Post by NeverSimple »

answering myself...

Today I downloaded GhostBSD 19.09 RELEASE, made a USB flash drive, boot my notebook with it and it failed in exactly the same way as before :cry:

On the boot manager menu for the (HP) laptop there are several options: one for a USB drive (with the correct name of the USB flash drive with GhostBSD on it), but it also has a 'Boot from EFI file' option. If I select that and drill down to /efi/boot/bootx64.efi on the USB flash drive, the live system boots! yeah. From that point on the install went flawless, now working on the MATE desktop, always used XFCE before. Now let's see what 19.09 has to offer.

@ericbsd Thanks for keeping up the hard work, really appreciate it.
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