a bunch of dumb questions about freebsd installing

[Eugene M. Zheganin]

Hi.

I have an IBM xSeries server, its ip-kvm and different FreeBSD images.
The goal is to perform a remote installation of FreeBSD using server 
ip-kvm and USB devices it emulates.
I can perform a non-remote installation in a wariety of ways but this 
post is about a remote one.

1) Since USB gives an cd(4) device, it's possible to boot from 
installation media, but impossible to use it for installation, because 
sysinstall wants acd0. Is there any way ? I cannot figure one, except 
using NFS or FTP install, which is not quite acceptable. Pure fixit 
sheel seems to be missing everything needed, at least I didn't succeeded 
at guessing where is mount for cd9660 and ls.

2) I downloaded a usb-key media, which is an .img file. This question 
does sound silly, and it really makes me look like a newbie and 
firsttimer (which, by the way, I am not, I'm installing FreeBSD for the 
second time :)) - but - anyway - what is exactly this .img and what is 
exactly an USB-key ? I used to think that, aside from it's internal 
design, this is the same think, but it appears that I'm wrong. Google 
didn't help much.

3) Why dd, reading an .img file and writing it to some /dev/da0 (as it's 
explained in handbook), which means it's not neither sliced nor 
partitioned (it also means that both loaders are presemt in image), 
makes a bootable media, and .img itself is not, because giving an .img 
file directly to the ip-kvm (and telling server to boot from it) 
produces 'No operating system installed' message ? Is there a way to 
produce a bootable image from such .img, without actual writing to the 
physical media, or at least using md(4) ?

Thanks.
Eugene.