A friend of mine posted in the German BSDForen.de a
nice howto to use an USB-Stick as a installmedium.
(German only i’ve translated to english ;-))
here is a quick howto:
1: clear your stick:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 bs=1k count=1
2: make the USB-Stick bootable
bsdlabel -Bw da0 auto
3: create an UFS2 Filesystem with GEOM Lable “FreeBSD”
newfs -L FreeBSD /dev/da0a
4: mount ISO-Image:
mdconfig -a -t vnode -f 8.0-HEAD-20090609-JPSNAP-i386-dvd1 -u 0 && mount -r -t cd9660 /dev/md0 /mnt/iso
5: mount your USB-STICK
mount /dev/da0a /mnt/USB-Stick
Now copy all files from your mounted cd
in to your USB-Stick, after that you need
to create a fstab for your USB-Stick:
vi /mnt/USB-Stick/fstab and put following in:
/dev/ufs/FreeBSD / ufs ro 0 0
save it. Now you can boot from the USB-Stick.
That’s nice to have for Netbooks or PCs without
a cd/dvd drive. :-).
http://miwi.bsdcrew.de/2009/06/freebsd-80-install-with-a-usb-stick/
