restore

[Leonard Zettel]

In which it is proven yet again that I don't know what
in blazes I'm doing-----.

I am a great fan of swappable hard drives.
i have two machines I plan to use for FreeBSD.
Let's call them the production machine and the
development machine.

The production machine is working just fine.
All the FreeBSD stuff is on ad0s1, a 40 GB hard drive.
I have been using a 120 GB drive on ad0s1 for
backup, and have (apparently successfully) done
a dump of production / and /usr.

So, I fire up the development machine with
the 120 GB drive as the slave of controller 1,
what I would like to be the main drive of the
development system (a 40GB hard drive) as
the master of controller 0, and disk 2 of the 
Free BSD CD-ROMs in the CD-ROM drive.

Up comes beastie and I boot.
I select "fixit" from the menu, followed by alt-F4.

Then:
mount /dev/ad0s1a /mnt (to make the new root accessible to 
                                         the system).
mkdir backup                   (make a mount point for the 120GB drive)
mount /dev/ad3s1a /backup (mount the 120 GB drive)
newfs /dev/ad0s1a           (start the new root with a clean sheet 
                                          prior to doing a retore)

BUT instead I get a diagnostic as follows:
fstab: /etc/fstab:0: No such file or directory
newfs: /dev/ad0s1a: failed to open disk for writing

Could anybody tell me what I *should* be doing (bonus
extra points for expalining why :-) )?"
  -LenZ-