FreeBSD USB Install

[Da Rock]

On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 14:11 -0200, Sergio de Almeida Lenzi wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I notice that when you write zeros to the first sectors
> of the pen drive it gets mad about it
> and you must make fsck and disklabel TWICE...
> 
> the first time, it complains,
> the second time it works fine
> 
> I assume you have grub installed   (pkg_add -r grub)
> 
> I use the folowing procedure:
> 1) put the pen drive on the computer  it finds at da0
> 2) dd bs=512 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 count=20  
> 2) fdisk  -BI /dev/da0
> 3) disklabel -w -B /dev/da0s1
> 4) fdisk -BI /dev/da0      
> 5) disklabel -w -B  /dev/da0s1
> 6) newfs -L FreeBSDstick /dev/da0s1a
> 7) mount -o async /dev/da0s1a /mnt
> 8) mkdir /mnt/boot/grub
> 9) cd /usr/local/share/grub/*/
> 10 cp * /mnt/boot/grub
> 11) cat <<% > /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst
> title FreeBSD on USB
> root (hd0,0,a)
> kernel /boot/loader
> %
> 12) umount /mnt
> 13) grub --batch <<%
> device (hd7) /dev/da0
> root (hd7,0,a)
> setup (hd7)
> %
> =========================
> now just populate the /mnt with bsd and your system 
> should come up...
> 
> =================================
> 
> 
> Hope this will help...
> 
> 
> Here i use 4gb pen-drivers running FreeBSD 7 with zfs...
> it works fine and very fast...
> 
> Sergio.

This seems to be a bit of a sideline... but how does it work if you move
the disk around? Assuming generic kernel, you should be boot that kernel
on practically any machine- right? But I had trouble with it not finding
the drive- boot manager ok, install fine, just won't boot. I assumed
that the da0xxx was simply a pointer (programming speak) so that if you
inserted the disk somewhere else (another port, another m/c, etc) it may
not "point" to the same place for booting. Would this be right?