Booting to Sysinstall

[Jerahmy Pocott]

On 25/09/2007, at 1:57 AM, Manolis Kiagias wrote:

> Jerahmy Pocott wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Okay so here is the situation:
>> Server has dead fd and cd drives, or maybe none at all. You want  
>> to install FreeBSD
>> on it.
>>
>> The idea I had was to create a small partition, copy the contents  
>> of a cd into, set it
>> to boot off that partition, reboot and it would boot up into  
>> sysinstall.
>>
>> Would this be possible? Or is it a dumb idea?
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>>
> The problem with this approach is, you actually need to boot the  
> FreeBSD kernel to continue with the install. Just by marking a  
> partition as bootable, will not make it boot, and neither copying  
> the FreeBSD CD contents will. You have to write a suitable boot  
> sector that will load the rest of the OS, be it DOS, Windows,  
> FreeBSD or whatever. And the fact remains, to install FreeBSD you  
> have to boot into the FreeBSD kernel.

Okay, well say I used some tools to create a UFS partition, put the  
contents of the Boot Only iso on it and put the FreeBSD
boot loader program into the MBR (it's boot0?) how could I get it to  
load the kernel? There seem to be a number of different
boot straps, boot, cdboot, pxeboot etc, on this iso image..

I experimented with this on an existing installation and for some  
reason the slice I created to boot into the basic environment
to install from ended up booting the existing installation instead of  
the version in the slice it was booting from?!