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I bought a Transcend USB flash drive (Jetflash 350, 16 GB) recently. My aim was to copy an image file (some FreeBSD ISO) on it and install FreeBSD on my machine. However, now I find that the flash drive does not support boot as mentioned here. Is there any way I can get around this? Could someone please help me with this?

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Though there is no factory support for making it a boot drive, that should not pose a problem to enabling boot through any Linux installation tool, as long as it is formatted so that the PC can read it at boot-up.

Any USB drive of ~2 GB or larger, preferably formatted FAT32 (FAT might work for a smaller drive), should work. Testing FreeBSD or other Linux distro on it should do no harm.

That said, there have been some messages about slow performance in FreeBSD of the JetFlash, stating it can be helped by enabling async cache. However, this is only an issue when writing to the device... running Linux from it (without caching data to a partition), or using it to install Linux, should not be a problem.

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  • Thanks for the reply. It seems that my BIOS / firmware was quite old and it was not supporting a 16 GB flash memory... that's the reason it was not showing in the BIOS boot menu as well. I have updated my BIOS and it's working fine now.
    – babon
    Jul 25, 2017 at 8:35
  • Good! Did the installation succeed?
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Jul 25, 2017 at 14:00
  • Well I am not getting time to sit down and do the installation (I am a lazy kind of person). Since now I am able to boot from the flash drive, I don't think there will be any problem. Anyways, will keep you posted.
    – babon
    Jul 26, 2017 at 4:31

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