Re: Pre-install Setup Questions

On 5/15/26 10:55, John Gaskill wrote:
> As a newbie to FreeBSD, I am interested in getting my installation done 
> correctly, providing as much utility to my system as possible.  I have 
> not found an answer in the Man pages or Handbook.  Maybe one of you 
> knows from experience.
> 
> Question 1:   Can the dvd1 iso be copied to a USB thumb drive and used 
> to boot he install from a UEFI BIOS?

i think that should work, but i usually grab the -memstick.img's you can 
copy them to a thumb drive doing something like:

cat FreeBSD-15.0-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img > /dev/da0

> 
> My system is a FreeBSD only system with AMD EPYC CPU, 32 GB RAM, a 2 TB 
> SAMSUNG 2280 SSD, and two 500 GB Seagate SSHDs, plus optical drive and 
> multiple USB ports.  ASUS PRIME motherboard.
> 
> Question 2:  Will a ZFS RAID configuration see a single SSD (ada0) 
> partitioned into the main boot drive partition (512k) freebsd-zfs 480 GB 
> plus freebsd-swap 20gb, plus three additional logical partitions of 480 
> GB freebsd-zfs and 5.25 GB freebsd-swap, as one disc drive or four for 
> purposes of calculating the RAID configuration?

i have a similar setup on my primary workstation.  i have a single nvme 
drive for my base OS (labeled as zroot).  i allow the installer to auto 
lay it out.  i then have 2 SSD's which i setup as a mirror and store 
most of my work there.  you can also stripe them if you want to maximize 
storage at the cost of no redundancy if a drive dies.

for your swap, probably best to keep it on your zroot device which is 
what the auto-layout will most likely do for you.

hope this helps.
-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
[email protected]