a bunch of dumb questions about freebsd installing

[Eugene M. Zheganin]

On 11.05.2011 15:14, Eugene M. Zheganin wrote:
> 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 ?
* " and what is exactly an USB-HDD ?"

ATM I've read that these are different mass-storage classes.

> 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) ?
>
Please ignore two last questions. Seems like FreeBSD tracker is seeding 
a corrupted memstick image - some of the first megabytes are plain 
zeroes, and the md5 is not the md5 from ftp.

Thanks.
Eugene.