dd question

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 27 Sep 2015 08:05:27 -0453.75, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> *Booooyah* !!!! That is almost exactly what I did, minus the 
> 'conv=sync', & it worked AOK. I noticed that the dd-ed image had no slices:
> 
> [...]
> 
> i.e. no da0s1, is that necessary to use the drive for install ?

This approach is called "dedicated", i. e. no slices, but the
device is partitioned (even though when you only find one
partition that covers the whole device: 'a' indicates a
bootable partition, 'c' refers to the whole device). Slices
("MS-DOS primary partitions") are optional and have primarily
been "invented" to conform to the concepts of the PC, when
FreeBSD (or UNIX in general) arrived at that time. Today,
we tend to use GPT partitions. :-)



> I also 
> noticed that when I manually mount the drive, it reports a size much 
> smaller than the whole drive:
> [...]
> /dev/da0a             ufs            698671    651741      -8963 101%    
> /media/sd

You can see that the device is "full". :-)



> I.e. 698-ish MiB on a 4-ish GB (3.6-ish GiB) drive.

That looks like a size typically found on CDs (650 MB average).



> Can I fix that in 
> place ? I would like the rest of the drive space to possibly log details 
> of the install in case of questions.

Maybe the installation media, even though on writable media, is
mounted ro? The easiest thing to capture logs is to perform the
installation from a "fully writable" live file system, or simply
mount a network resource r/w.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...