Re: howto sidestep sysinstall during installation

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 03:45:03PM +0930, Daniel O'Connor wrote:

> On Mon, 11 May 2009, Saifi Khan wrote:
> > Is there a way to sidestep the sysinstall during the
> > installation process, beyond selecting the 'location' ?
> >
> > i'm using FreeBSD 8.0 200905 i386 snapshot DVD and looking
> > for an approach to drive the entire installation from the
> > Fixit# command line console.
> >
> > i'm a experienced Gentoo Linux user.
> >
> > Any suggestions, pointers or observations ?
> 
> You won't be able to partition the disk from the command line because 
> the install MFS doesn't have any of the requisite tools to do so.

???????   I don't understand this comment.
Recreating a disk - slice/parttion/newfs - is one of the main things
to do under a fixit.   You should have fdisk, bsdlabel and newfs there
as well as restore for sucking dumps back in.

The only thing to remember is that the running writable root file system 
under fixit is in memory.   You have to make sure that what you do is to 
the disk and that the fstab you create is on the disk.   It is easy to
lose track and make an /etc/fstab modification or a mount point in the 
MFS and then find it is no longer there when you reboot.  But, you just 
have to pay attention to where you are doing things.

////jerry




> 
> You could do it from a livefs disk however.
> 
> As for observations.. I think you're wasting your time :)
> 
> -- 
> 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