Installation fail (i386 usb bootonly 9.0)

[radoslav.tm]

Hello,

I decided to share my experience with installing 9.0 from x86 usb bootonly image. At the end I was able to manage, but that is after several hours w/o sleep, gallon of beer and bag of junk food. So:

Test station is laptop Acer 5920g with RAM & Videocard upgrade.

1. I booted from USB stick and each time I had to wait 10-15 minutes for that (dunno why).
2. Ran the installer until the choice between whether from CD/DVD or Internet must be made. You choose Internet.
3. The Internet connection cannot be found so the focus moves automatically to the manual selection of server and path. Say you put for server "mirrors.ics.org" and for path "/pub/pcbsd/9.0/i386". That path is not working in fact but that is a separate case (maybe in the handbook there is an example for working one?).
4. Now the real problem. You press finnish, so that the installation begins and - it stops. It says that: ifconfig inet bge0 is NOT working and really, the inet paramater shouldn't be there.

Anyway, I solved it in the following way:

1. Reach again the CD/DVD vs. Internet choice.
2. In xterm, I mount the USB, get from there my custom ifconfig replacer. I don't say that it is smart:

#! /bin/sh
if test "inet" = "$1" -o "inet6" = "$1"; then
  NEXT="$2 $1 $3 $4 $5 $6 $7 $8 $9"
else
  NEXT="$1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 $7 $8 $9"
fi
`ifconfig_real $NEXT`

3. I set my IP, netmask & route IP.
4. The installer nows finds that it can connect to internet, so I don't need to manually type URL.
5. Before the finnish procedure I unmount my USB, and remove the netmask and route IP. I leave the card IP though, as the installer does not set it.
6. Voila, I had my PCBSD. Thanks.

Hope that this can be useful info for you though.
Radoslav.

[dlavigne]

Closing ticket as bootonly is no longer an option from the installation media.