Remastering PCBSD

[cabpa]

Do we have remastering software/app in PCBSD where we can remaster PCBSD with the selected PBIs that we installed and can install/reinstall the remastered PCBSD iso on our computer and other computers?

[RyanBram]

Modify the existing PC-BSD .iso by editing PC-Sysinstall and all packages that was included there.
This is the manual.

[cabpa]

Modify the existing PC-BSD .iso by editing PC-Sysinstall and all packages that was included there.
This is the manual.

Hi RyanBram,

What I mean is we remaster the installed PCBSD on the hard drive plus the apps we installed from AppCafe/ports.

[RyanBram]

Sorry, did you ever read the manual until end?
In the last part of the manual that I mentioned before, there is a way to create a bootable ISO from a PC-BSD directory (or entire).

This is the example:

mkisofs -V mycustominstall -J -R -b boot/cdboot -no-emul-boot -o myinstall.iso

I hope I didn't misunderstand.

[Cobalt]

Couldn't you use something like http://www.partimage.org/ to do the same thing? I used a similar (or the same, I can't remember) program in high school and it worked like a charm. It used a server to obtain the image and write it to the drive. You can use Partimage to make a disc (or a few discs) which can be booted and will write the image from the disc(s).

[cabpa]

Thanks RyanBram and Cobalt
RyanBram, so you had successfully created and installable remastered PCBSD iso with mkisofs command?

[RyanBram]

RyanBram, so you had successfully created and installable remastered PCBSD iso with mkisofs command?

For additional information, a Live CD must meet El Torito standard, otherwise your CD/DVD medium can't bootable. That's why -b option was used in mkisofs command.

According to FreeBSD Man Page, to make El Torito Live CD, we must do the following step:

Specifies the path and filename of the boot image to be used
when making an "El Torito" bootable CD. The pathname must be
relative to the source path specified to mkisofs. This option
is required to make an "El Torito" bootable CD. The boot image
must be exactly the size of either a 1200, 1440, or a 2880 kB
floppy, and mkisofs will use this size when creating the output
iso9660 filesystem. It is assumed that the first 512 byte sector
should be read from the boot image (it is essentially emulating
a normal floppy drive). This will work, for example, if the
boot image is a LILO based boot floppy.

If the boot image is not an image of a floppy, you need to add
one of the options: -hard-disk-boot or -no-emul-boot. If the
system should not boot off the emulated disk, use -no-boot.

If the -sort option has not been specified, the boot images are
sorted with low priority (+2) to the beginning of the medium.
If you don't like this, you need to specify a sort weight of 0
for the boot images.

This is some links that may be useful for you:

• FreeBSD Man Pages;
• FreeBSD HandBook;
• El Torito Specification (pdf)

Good luck.