Should I be able to install to a BIOS found USB HD?

[fuzzynco]

I have a WD external USB HD 160gb, it has a 11gb fat32 and
the rest is a freebsd slice. sysinstall can create the slice
then create the bsd labels for the freebsd partititions in it.
when it starts to actually do the install the installer
fails with a paging crash. the system has 4gb ram it shouldn't
need to page to format & load the system should it?

I allocated 1gb /, 4gb swap, 10gb /tmp, 20gb /usr, 20gb /var,
20gb /usr/src and whatever it would allow for the leftover to
/work. Thats 7 bsdlabel partitons, I think its allowed 8,
so I thought that was ok?

I have the dvd for 7.2r. I told it to load all
the sources and the ports collection. I also tried to
run it with the bsd label auto setup and normal user
defaults incase it was something I did in configuration,
it still fails with a paging crash.

any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks

Copyright (C) 1999-2003 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: TIGGER

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status      Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  ----------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online       466 GB      0 B
  Disk 1    Online       466 GB      0 B
  Disk 2    Online       112 GB      0 B

DISKPART>

DISKPART> select disk 2

Disk 2 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Primary             11 GB    32 KB
  Partition 2    Unknown            101 GB    11 GB

DISKPART>

 

[SirDice]

I allocated 1gb /, 4gb swap, 10gb /tmp, 20gb /usr, 20gb /var,
20gb /usr/src and whatever it would allow for the leftover to
/work. Thats 7 bsdlabel partitons, I think its allowed 8,
so I thought that was ok?

Sounds good but I would change the sizes a little.

There's no need for a 1GB root. 512MB will do fine. 4GB swap is a bit much unless you plan on a heavy duty server. 20GB /usr/src is way too much. Mine fits nicely in 1GB with only half of it used. When compiling world everything will end up in /usr/obj anyway (which uses about 2GB). You may want to reserve some space for /usr/ports though especially if you're going to build a lot of ports yourself.

 

[fuzzynco]

I guess if left all of /usr together that would also work? maybe 20gb
(based on what you said) and seperate the rest (remaining 27gb or so)
into a extra partition that could be used to move data around if something got too full. Can I copy the current contents of /usr/ports
(output of 'portsnap fetch extract') into somewhere else and do a
'portsnap fetch update -p /newports' then fixup /etc/fstab to mount
it in the correct place?