Preparing internal and external storage for FreeBSD

Internal and external storage has to be prepared and formatted for the operating system FreeBSD to be able to use it. FreeBSD supports different ways to prepare storage. However, this is the recommended procedure for preparing and formatting internal or external storage for use with FreeBSD in a way, that is supported and compatible.

Create a directory, that can be used as a mount point for the storage, and run the system maintenance tool. Use a short name without special characters, such as underscore.

mkdir /mnt/usbs
sysinstall

Use arrow keys to highlight Index. Press Enter. Use arrow keys to highlight Partition. Press Enter. Use arrow keys to highlight the device node for the storage. Press Space. Use arrow keys to hightlight a used slice. Press D. Repeat this until only one unused slice remains. Press A. Press W. A dialog about an existing system appears. Press Y. A dialog about a boot manager appears. Press Enter. A dialog about succesful write appears. Press Enter. Press Q. Press C.

Use arrow keys to hightlight Label. Press Enter. Press C. Press Enter. A dialog about file system appears. Confirm, that FS is highlighted. Press Enter. A dialog about mount point appears. Enter the mount point. Press Enter. Press W. A dialog about existing system appears. Press Y. Press C. Press C.

Press X.

Test, that you can mount and unmount the storage. In our example, the device node is da0s1d, which is to be read as partition d on slice 1 on external storage device da0.

umount /mnt/usbs
ls -ld /dev/da*
mount /dev/da0s1d /mnt/usbs