>From: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
>
>  maximum entropy <entropy@zippy.bernstein.com> writes:
>
>>- It isn't possible to sysinst to the disk you just installed from, so
>>this method requires two disks.  I realize it's not reasonable to
>>expect this to work, but it isn't documented in the pmax install
>>NOTES.
>
>If I'm understanding you, this *does* work, in several  ways:
>
>	 1.  If you've netbooted from the diskimage.tar.gz, you should
>	     also be able to run sysinst from the diskless root,
>	     and label the local disk.
>
>If that's not clear, it should be documented better in the NOTES and
>in a real install document.

I did try that and it worked fine.  I don't think it was documented,
though.

>	 2.  If you  dd the raw diskimage onto the raw partition
>	     of a disk and boot it, you can run sysinst from the
>	     `a` partition of that disk -- with the current root
>	     the same as the installation  target disks.
>	     This should Just Work.

That's what didn't work for me.  With root mounted readonly
(root_device on /), sysinst complains about not being able to figure
out what the root device is.  When I remounted root read/write (mount
-u /dev/rz0a /) sysinst spewed out some errors.  I'll admit I didn't
wait and see what happened anyway, but it didn't look good.  I didn't
write down the errors either becuase I didn't really expect this to
work.  If I recall correctly, it was mostly things such as newfs and
mount complaining that the device was busy.

>>- Before starting sysinst you need to remount root read-write.  This
>>should either be documented or sysinst should do it for you.  If root
>>is left readonly, sysinst will fail to mount the partitions for the
>>new disk after newfsing them.
>
>I guess so. Perhaps sysinst should just complain and exit if the root
>is not mounted read-write. read-only NFS roots are sort of plausible,
>though.

Actually, I'm not sure it matters whether it's read-write, but it does
need to be explicitly mounted.  The default mode of "root_device on /"
isn't good enough.  sysinst wants to know what the real root device
is, and complains if it can't find it.

Cheers,
entropy

--
entropy -- it's not just a good idea, it's the second law.