Silly Sysinstall Tricks, redux

[Randi Harper]

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Sean Bruno <seanbru at yahoo-inc.com> wrote:
> Karsten asked for a "proper bug report" so I'll try to comply.
>
> Setup:
>        Partition a USB stick into 3 seperate partitions
>        -- Part 1: VFAT, 128MB, Grub boot loader and related files
>        -- Part 2: Empty partition, 1.2GB, no F/S
>        -- Part 3: Empty partition, 1.2GB, no F/S
>
>        Download the latest i386 and amd64 USB install images:
> ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/201006/FreeBSD-9.0-CURRENT-201006-amd64-memstick.img
> ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/201006/FreeBSD-9.0-CURRENT-201006-i386-memstick.img
>
>        I'm using 201006 for now as July hasn't appeared.
>
>        dd the downloaded images to each of your empty partions as per common
> instructions:
>        dd if=FreeBSD-9.0-CURRENT-201006-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/da0s2
> bs=10240 conv=sync
>        dd if=FreeBSD-9.0-CURRENT-201006-i386-memstick.img of=/dev/da0s3
> bs=10240 conv=sync
>
>        Setup your grub configuration to boot off of these images:
>        e.g.
>        title FreeBSD-CURRENT-i386
>                root (hd0,1)
>                chainloader +1
>        title FreeBSD-CURRENT-amd64
>                root (hd0,2)
>                chainloader +1
>
>        Boot new system off of USB stick, at this point the system will boot
> normally and come up into the sysinstall menu.  I can configure drives,
> select packages and things seem to work fine until the I get to the
> "select media from which to install" section where I can chose CD/DVD,
> FTP, HTTP, USB etc.
>
>        Selecting USB install fails to find any media.  Hence I *ass*ume that
> sysinstall doesn't understand that the media can have more than one
> partition and that I might want to use something other than da0s1 to use
> as my source of packages.
>
>
>        Clear?  Confusing?  Nonsense?  :-)
>
> Sean
>

So, the way I did the USB stuff was a dirty, dirty hack. It looks for
da0a (or c, i can't recall). Eventually, this is going away. But the
jist of it is that you have to dd the memstick to da0, not a slice. :(

Someday (soon, hopefully) we'll be using labels for install media.

-- randi