cannot install from existing UFS thumb drive with sysinstall

Carl k0802647 at telus.net
Thu Oct 9 10:30:09 UTC 2008


I've crafted a USB flash thumb drive containing a bootable UFS partition 
containing the contents of 7.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso. It boots properly 
and sysinstall runs as expected, so I'm all set to install FreeBSD to a 
system that has no optical drive. Just as "fbsd2" in the following 
thread, I ran into the problem of being unable to specify the USB thumb 
drive as the installation media:

http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/questions/2007-08/msg00369.html
[ http://tinyurl.com/4o7pkl ]

I was not deterred though because I knew from Reid Linnemann's response 
that I just needed to select "Install from an existing filesystem". I 
also understood that I'd need to go to the Fixit menu first and launch 
the Emergency Holographic Shell (EHS) first in order to mount the thumb 
drive's UFS partition. Unfortunately, the final response in the above 
thread appears to indicate that "fbsd2" might not have understood what 
he was seeing and it seems no one followed up with an explanation or 
solution. The problem is that the EHS, exactly as advertised, has a very 
small set of commands. While it does include 'mount_nfs', it does not 
appear to include anything for mounting a local UFS filesystem, which 
strikes me as being a strange thing to leave out.

So, can anyone tell me how I can mount my thumb drive's UFS partition 
from within sysinstall? Linnemann countering the "fbsd2" assertion that 
this is a show stopper now looks to me to have been a little hasty, but 
I need to believe I'm missing something here.

If there really isn't a way to mount the thumb drive's filesystem, is 
there a way to custom the ISO content such that either 1) the EHS can 
have 'mount' added to it, or 2) the thumb drive's filesystem can be 
automatically mounted upon sysinstall startup? Yes, I realize anything's 
possible if I were willing to build a whole new custom ISO from the 
ground up, but that's more dramatic than I'm ready for.

I know virtually nothing about NFS, so excuse what is probably a stupid 
question... is it possible to use sysinstall's NFS capabilities to mount 
a local UFS filesystem somehow?

Carl                                             / K0802647



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