Install issues

[William A. Mahaffey III]

I am attempting to provision a new box w/ FreeBSD 9.3R, using a 
customized USB drive w/ the default install media plus some scripts I 
conjured up to expedite partitioning/slicing of HDD's. I plugged the USB 
stick in & powered on. Though the UEFI BIOS gave my no options to 
configure boot order, it did figure out that the USB stick was there & 
bootable. I booted from that & the loading proceeded up to the regular 
FreeBSD 'choose boot options' screen, w/ multi-user, single user, etc. 
(6 choices total, w/ the ASCII-art logo). I let it go w/ option 1 (bad 
choice :-) ? ) & it failed to get booted, but gave me a choice of boot 
devices at the 'mountfs' (or some such) prompt. I entered 
'ufs:/dev/da0s1a rw' & it proceeded to boot the installer. At 1st 
prompt, i chose 'Shell' & dropped to the shell to run my utilities. The 
1st problem was that the USB media was mounted 'ro', *not* 'rw' as I 
asked, making it tough to log what was going on to use in queries such 
as this one when problems arose. My script completed down to an error in 
an innocuous echo statement, but subsequent df revealed no customized 
partitions visible for the install to proceed with, & little way to 
discern what had happened, since everything scrolled past too fast & too 
far to recover. I never found a magic key-stroke combo to page up in 
console mode, so I am mostly in the dark. Is there a way to force the 
booted root drive to be mounted 'rw' ? FWIW, I did this early in the 
summer in a (somewhat complex) NetBSD install, which is where I got the 
idea. I was able to accurately log my many screwups & post to their list 
for help, which was instrumental to eventually getting that box up & 
running.


-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

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	"The M1 Garand is without doubt the finest implement of war
	 ever devised by man."
                            -- Gen. George S. Patton Jr.