Boot from external USB disk

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Hi,

I've finally been able to install NetBSD 9 in a VM. I've had tons of problems with package installation but these seem to have been addressed. The only remaining issues are frequent stale downloads, preventing scripted installation. Anyway, it's time for the next step: installation on real hardware.

I've installed NetBSD on an external USB disk and made sure its /etc/fstab was correct. However, when I reboot on this disk, I have a "Heap full" error and the machine boots on its internal disk.

If I drop to the boot prompt and type "boot hd0:", NetBSD boots normally.

My guess is that I need to set some obscure option in some configuration file. With FreeBSD, I need to set vfs.mountroot.timeout="10" in /boot/loader.conf. With OpenBSD, I don't need to do anything.

Can someone tell me what I should do for NetBSD in this case?

Jay

20-100
Hi for stale download issue try choosing mirror near you also recommend adding this two lines at rc.conf

ipv6addrctl=YES
ipv6addrctl_policy=ipv4_prefer

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I thought the CDN was doing just that (providing a server close to the user's location).
After testing all the mirrors listed on the NetBSD site, it appears that only 4 have a copy of the package collection:

ftp3.de.netbsd.org
nyftp.netbsd.org
ftp.fr.netbsd.org
ftp7.jp.netbsd.org

All the others provide only the installers, not the packages (i.e. they have no /pub/pkgsrc tree).
The default server is cdn.netbsd.org (= nyftp.netbsd.org).
I'll try one in Germany or France, it will probably be much better. 🙂

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In case someone else had the same needs:

The German mirror works quite well for me (living in Luxembourg).
I've tried playing with installboot(8) and finally found a solution using: installboot -o modules /dev/rsd0a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv2

As far as I understand, this means that in order to boot from a USB drive, you have to enable the loading of kernel modules with the '-o modules' option.

The other parameters are the name of my boot partition (/dev/rsd0a) and the boot block corresponding to its type (/usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv2).

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For the record:

I've tried to install NetBSD onto another disk and it worked, so I made further investigations on the disk having the issue.
I turned out it had a remaining zfs_member signature somewhere, which I only saw after trying to recreate its partition table with fdisk under Linux.
Once cleaned, the installation worked fine and the only manual operation needed is to check /etc/fstab, and fix it if needed. (Using installboot is NOT needed.)

I have also installed NetBSD on a server (Dell R610) previously running FreeBSD.
The problem I had there is that NetBSD does not support EFI partition sizes greater than 128 MB.
In this case also, I had to wipe the partition table, but I could do it with NetBSD's gpt(8).

20-100 thanks for coming back and correct the information.