installing from a harddisk prepared in a functional system

[Steve Franks]

How does one make a 'boot' disk - be it cdrom, harddrive or flash
(presuming your bios will boot from all those devices, of course)?

1.The handbook specifies you need to minimally copy the /bin folder to
the destination.
2. Obviously you want a valid ufs2 partition.
3. I've repeatedly tried setting the 'bootable' option in fdisk, and
the 'A' appears next to the slice, but everytime I reboot it
dissappears, even after a 'W' command, so I'm going to try to get this
to go without using sysinstall by a manual copy, if I can.
4. Windows partitions need some special files, i.e. ntldr, at a
special location on the boot partiton - equivalent in bsd? Or does the
loader just look for /bin and load the kernel from there?
5. bootloader seems to work when I put the disk in the new computer -
get F1 and F2, but nothing else happens.

Basically I'm trying to make an 'image' - put a fresh disk in my
working system, format it, make it boot, at least to sysinstall, so I
can put it in my other system that has no floppy or cdrom to install
from, and get things rolling over the network card.  I was thinking I
could just do this with a single partition on the target disk, like
the install cdrom's do.  I want to turn a harddisk into an install
cdrom, and then have it install to itself, a dangerous idea, no doubt,
but it appears that it could work, I just can't get the new disk to
boot in the new system.

Thanks,
Steve

-- 
Steve Franks, KE7BTE
Staff Engineer
La Palma Devices, LLC
http://www.lapalmadevices.com
(520) 312-0089