Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 15:14:28 +0600 From: "Eugene M. Zheganin" <eugene@zhegan.in> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: a bunch of dumb questions about freebsd installing Message-ID: <4DCA5374.2020306@zhegan.in>
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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.
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