Unable to install FreeBSD from external USB cdrom

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> The other approach would be to just splat an install CD onto a flash
> disk, eg..
>
> fdisk -BI /dev/da0
> bsdlabel -w -B /dev/da0s1
> newfs -b 4096 -f 512 -i 8192 -O1 -U /dev/da0s1
> mount /dev/da0s1a /mnt
> cd /mnt
> tar zxf /dev/acd0
> umount /mnt
>
> ... actually that won't work because sysinstall doesn't know how to
> mount UFS partitions to read dist files :(
>
> I did look at adding that when I did the patch for FAT partitions but
> it's more complex (I wasn't sure of the canonical way to find them..
> Easiest would be to look in /dev I guess)

As part of this I wrote a patch that teaches sysinstall how to load 
install.cfg from a CDROM or DOS partition (eg USB stick).

I just submitted a PR but haven't got a number yet, here is the patch..
http://www.gsoft.com.au/~doconnor/sysinstall-cfg-menu.diff

Currently I still use DVD for the actual install..

I have booted a sysinstall (I extracted it from mfsroot.gz into /sbin 
and did 'set init_path=/sbin/sysinstall in the loader), however I 
haven't fully tested it as I ran out of time.

The problem is that unless you boot sysinstall as init it goes 
into "maintenance" mode and will not install stuff properly - by 
design.

If anyone is interested in hacking on this sort of stuff feel free to 
get it touch with me :)

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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