a new hard-drive in a 2y/o laptop [solved]

[Chris Brennan]

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 6:04 PM, Bruce Cran <bruce at cran.org.uk> wrote:

> http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/ZFSBootPartition has a good guide for
> installing the base manually (you can ignore the gpart and zfs
> commands if you want). I found I had to copy the base and kernel
> directories from the install ISO to a UFS-formatted USB stick first
> though since the LiveFS CD doesn't have the distributions.
>
> --
> Bruce Cran
>

Bruce, your a lifesaver! +1 for you and your wiki page. +1 for Warren's page
(
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/disksetup.html#_the_old_standard_way_tt_fdisk_8_tt_and_tt_bsdlabel_8_tt)
and +5 for Ian and his incredible patience. Hodgepodging Warren's and
Bruce's pages together got me a working base. Laptop is now installed w/o
the assistance of a boot cd or the usb hard-drive I was using.

I did have to grab a DVD of 8.1 and burn it to a DVDRW, just so I could get
access to /dist/8.1-*. That being said, I think I am going to look at
setting up that same external hd w/ a full 8.2-R root when it's ready, so I
have a full, local tree to utilize for weird installs like this (I don't
know why I never did that before)