Solved Reinstalling from UFS to ZFS (mirror)

Is it possibe to run bsdinstall from an existing installation (12.1-RELEASE) onto another connected HDD? Reason I ask is because I'm looking to move/reinstall FreeBSD on my desktop machine from a single 1TB HDD (UFS) to 2x 1TB (ZFS mirror).

Here are the steps I am thinking of following so far;

1) Plug in the new 1TB HDD.
2) Install FreeBSD onto new HDD using bsdinstall to setup and install onto a ZFS partition.
3) Copy across my home directory from old HDD.
4) Reboot into newly installed FreeBSD from new HDD.
5) Repartition old HDD to match the new HDD.
6) Attach the old disk as a ZFS mirror.
7) Celebrate with the knowledge my data is now safe(r)!?

Are the above steps the correct procedure for doing this?
 
Is it possibe to run bsdinstall from an existing installation (12.1-RELEASE) onto another connected HDD?
Never done this but I'm going to say yes.

3) Copy across my home directory from old HDD.
This is the easy part, skip this until you can get the new system up and running.
Reboot into newly installed FreeBSD from new HDD.
This might get a little tricky. But should be solvable. I would recommend swapping the disks at this point too. So the 'old' disk is last in the chain, instead of being the first. Getting the new setup booting on its own will be the first priority. Copying the data from the old drive can easily be done after this.
 
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An update on this...

1) Tried to install FreeBSD (as a ZFS mirror) onto my new drive using bsdinstall, but the installer wouldn't let me past drive partitioning stage as I was trying to setup a mirror with only one drive. Result: FAILURE

2) Tried installing FreeBSD from my existing install using bsdinstall onto a spare SSD (with UFS), with the intention of then using that temporary installation to reinstall FreeBSD onto my 2xHDDs as a ZFS mirror. Unfortunately bsdinstall errored out just after downloading the kernel and base tarballs, complaining about not finding the MANIFEST file. Result: FAILURE

3) I ended up just copying my home directory onto the spare SSD, reinstalling FreeBSD (as a ZFS mirror) with an old 11.1-RELEASE DVD I found in a drawer, and upgrading it to 12.1-RELEASE.

Why didn't I simply burn a 12.1-RELEASE DVD and install from that in the first place you ask?!? Because my DVD writer is playing up (every ISO I burnt to DVD will not boot), and my BIOS is too old to allow booting from USB.

It's all sorted now, but it was a shame bsdinstall didn't seem happy installing from a running system onto a blank drive.
 
It's possible to add a sparse file to a mirror and then immediately offline that "disk" and start copying files to the mirror in a degraded state. But I'm not sure how that would work with bsdinstall.
 
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