Problems with USB drive booting, installing over NFS mount

[Mike Sweetser - Adhost]

I've been trying to get a server installed with FreeBSD 6.1 from either
a USB CD or floppy, or an NFS mount for nearly a week, with no luck.
(The server has no CD-ROM drive or floppy drive, and is SATA-only).

When trying to boot from the FreeBSD install CD from a USB CD-ROM drive,
or when booting from a boot floppy from a USB floppy drive, at the very
start of booting, it starts scrolling a hexadecimal dump, and becomes
unresponsive.

I've set up a basic FreeBSD server install as a PXE/TFTP/NFS server and
have the server booting off that into FreeBSD, but whenever I run
sysinstall, I get as far as it extracting the distribution.  At the
first area, once it gets to 7%, it always errors out, saying that it's
lost connection to the NFS mount.  It never reestablished the connection
and hangs there.

Any ideas of anything I can do?  This is really getting frustrating.

Mike Sweetser

--------------------------
Mike Sweetser | Systems Administrator

Adhost Internet
140 Fourth Avenue North, Suite 360, Seattle, Washington 98109 USA
P 206.404.9000    T 888.234.6781 (ADHOST-1)    F 206.404.9050
E mikesw at adhost.com    W adhost.com

Our brand new Adhost West data center is open - contact us for a tour at
1-888-234-6781 (ADHOST-1)