Telling "bsdinstall" to ignore a step?
reddit / BSD

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loudle · 2020-07-30 08:42

On OpenBSD you can drop into a shell before the installation, modify
the script (e.g. comment out the steps you want to skip), and return
to the menu to begin the installation. I've never run the FreeBSD
installer, but you might be able to do something similar.

edit: looks like you might get a read-only fs on freebsd, as at least
the amd64 dvd installer simply mounts the install medium as the root
instead of using a ramdisk. i had some success with this:

    mkdir /tmp/dist
    ln -s /usr/freebsd-dist/* /tmp/dist/
    rm /tmp/dist/MANIFEST
    cp `which bsdinstall` /tmp/dist/bsdinstall

then edit `bsdinstall`, changing the global variable
`BSDINSTALL_DISTDIR` to `/tmp/dist` and run `/tmp/dist/bsdinstall`

the installer component `/usr/libexec/bsdinstall/auto` checks to see
if `MANIFEST` exists before doing the checksum step, otherwise it
skips it. though it still seems to hash the files, so maybe i missed
something