cannot install from existing UFS thumb drive with sysinstall

[Carl]

FBSD1 wrote:
> There is a outstanding PR on sysinstall from usb flash drive which is now
> over a year old. The sysinstall install program needs to be updated to use
> usb drives as the source of the install media. You could always edit the
> sysinstall program source code and make a patch to allow usb sysinstall
> media.  Other than that you are S.O.L.
> 
> I use this script to build my bootable 1GB USB flash drive  [ ... ]

Should I assume you've tried the fdisk/disk label method of mounting 
your flash drive in sysinstall and that it does not actually work either?

I've been using FreeBSD for well over a decade and it seems that 
sysinstall development was all but abandoned a very long time ago.

FWIW, the reason I didn't use your script was that in my case I'm 
actually creating multiple partitions on an 8GB thumb drive and using 
syslinux such that I can boot any one of several live disk images. 
FreeBSD seems to be the one distribution that hasn't clued in that USB 
flash devices are ubiquitous. For my hardware, it also looks like 
FreeBSD may be having problems with SATA DVD drives too. Since the 
motherboard has no IDE controller, USB flash drives may be my only hope 
unless I want to move to another OS.

Carl                                             / K0802647