init troubles with custom install

[William Bierman]

Hello.  I have been endeavoring to create my own livecd which will
mount a remote share from which to run scripts installing a ghost
image onto a local hard drive.  I realize this may be more trouble
than it's worth, but I am doing it to easily assimilate new machines
into a Beowulf cluster... so I think it is.

I have done everything I can think of to do this properly:

1) I used the process defined in the bsdlabel man page for setting up
the slices/partitions/labels/etc. (search for dd in the man page)

2) I extracted the ghost images, in the form of tarballs, to the /,
/usr, and /var slices.  There is a partition for /tmp, but empty.  I
also setup a 1Gb swap slice.  These slices are setup to mirror how
they would be if I were to use the standard fbsd install cd.

Now, here's the problem.. the kernel loads, and I start getting a list
of the devices it detects, and it reaches the point of 'Mounting root
from "ufs:ad0s1a"', then locks up.  Either init is not being called,
or is stalling somewhere.  I have disabled pnp in my BIOS settings,
and I have a single 16G IDE hard disk to which these operations are
being performed.  I have tried the various options in the boot menu
(single user, safe mode, verbose logging, etc.) and the only useful
information I get is when in verbose logging mode, it reaches the halt
point, and additionally says:

start_init: trying /sbin/init

then halts.

Could anyone shed some light on this for me?  I can provide whatever
additional information may be necessary.

Thanks!

William