cannot install from existing UFS thumb drive with sysinstall

Carl Voth cvoth at telus.net
Fri Oct 10 12:10:20 UTC 2008


Is there no one out there that can help?

I've dug into NFS a little more and that does not appear to support 
mounting a local filesystem under sysinstall.

In the following thread, Richard Tobin makes an assertion that suggests 
that I might be able to mount my thumb drive's existing UFS partition in 
the disk labelling step.

http://unix.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc/2004-10/0920.html
[ http://tinyurl.com/3mknq7 ]

The first problem I ran into was that there is no way to add a second 
drive (ie. target drive is SATA hard disk, thumb drive is install drive) 
to the disk labelling step. The only way that that can be achieved is by 
first adding it to the fdisk partitioning step. I'm willing to believe 
that *maybe* there's no risk to my thumb drive in rewriting it's disk 
label if I'm very careful not to newfs it. But nothing about the fdisk 
partition editor gives me a sense that it will hold off of rewriting my 
thumb drive's slice table even though I'm not trying to change anything. 
It just seems perverse to have to reslice and relabel just to mount an 
existing filesystem. If the only way one can mount a local filesystem in 
sysinstall is using the disk label editor, can someone explain to me the 
actual consequences and risks of this procedure? I did not proceed to 
Write or Commit in this little experiment yet because of the unknown risks.

I have to say that I cannot believe how horribly unfriendly sysinstall 
is for anyone wanting to use a USB thumb drive as an install medium. In 
fact, it's looking totally unusable.

Clearly sysinstall is utilizing 'mount' functionality for it's own 
purposes. Surely there's some way for me to access it too?!?

Carl                                             / K0802647


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