BTX Loader crashes -- Help wanted

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

[[ To: Michael Powell <nightrecon at hotmail.com>... please accept my apologies
that you can't e-mail me directly.  I jsyt get too much spam from hotmail.com,
so it's blacklisted here.  Nothing personal. ]]

In message <7872.1258759936 at tristatelogic.com>, 
Michael Powell <nightrecon at hotmail.com> wrote:

rfg:
>>> The problem(s) occurs with FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE/i386 disk1 (CD),
>>> 7.0-RELEASE/i386 disk1 (CD), 7.2-RELEASE/i386 Live Filesystem (CD), and
>>> 7.2-RELEASE/amd64 Live Filesystem (CD).
>>
>>Try 8RC3 and see if any difference. I believe some work in this area may 
>>have occurred.

As I said (in my other post) that didn't help. :-(

But...

While researching this problem (BTX v. SATA) I saw where someone recommended
booting from floppy first.

So I went and started to download images on boot floppies.

I haven't used this install/booting method for ages and ages, but I vaguely
recalled that you could get rolling with just a single boot floppy.
But now I see where they say you need the first boot floppy and then three
more "kernel" floppies!  Yikes!  Sounds like a bit of a pain.

So that gave me a Swell Idea.

I though "Hey! Wouldn't it be great if we could put all this stuff into
one single image and ``burn'' it onto a bootable USB thumb drive!  I should
definitely write to the FreeBSD developers and suggest this Great Idea.''

But of course, since you directed me to 8.0-RC3, I had to go groveling 
around in the relevant FTP directories to get that stuff, and while I
was there, of course, I saw:

   8.0-RC3-amd64-memstick.img

Yippie!  Some smart FreeBSD deloper is already way ahead of me!  Marvelous!

Now all I need is instructions for how to use that .img file.  (Fortunately,
I have a spare USB 1GB flash drive lying around.)

So I go groveling around, trying to find some mention of this .img file
in the README.TXT files and I find nothing.  But Google is my friend, and
I found this:

  http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2009-July/051018.html

which gives instructions for ``burning'' the image onto USB/flash.

But I have one question.  The author sez to do this:

   dd if=8.0-BETA1-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/da0 bs=10240 conv=sync

I just want to know what the effect of conv=sync and why it might be
necessary.

Anybody happen to know?

Why can't you just dd the thing?