How to write FreeBSD image to USB disk for installation using dd command

To write a FreeBSD image to a USB disk for installation using the dd command, you will need to follow these steps:

1. Download the FreeBSD installation image. Download the FreeBSD installation image from the FreeBSD website or a mirror site. The image file will have a .img or .iso extension.

2. Insert the USB disk into your computer. Make sure to use a USB disk that is large enough to hold the installation image.

3. Find the device name of the USB disk. Use the lsblk command to list the block devices on your system, and find the device name of the USB disk. The device name will be in the form /dev/sdX, where X is a letter. Make sure to note the device name, as you will need it in the next step.

4. Unmount the USB disk. Before you can write the image to the USB disk, you need to unmount it. To unmount the USB disk, use the umount command, specifying the device name of the USB disk as an argument.

For example, if the device name of the USB disk is /dev/sdb, you can unmount it using the following command:

umount /dev/sdb

5. Write the image to the USB disk. Use the dd command to write the image to the USB disk. Specify the path to the image file as the input file, and the device name of the USB disk as the output file.

For example, to write the FreeBSD installation image FreeBSD-11.3-RELEASE-amd64.img to the USB disk /dev/sdb, you can use the following command:

dd if=FreeBSD-11.3-RELEASE-amd64.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

This will write the image to the USB disk. The bs option specifies the block size, which can improve the performance of the dd command.

6. Eject the USB disk. After the image has been written to the USB disk, you can eject it using the eject command:

eject /dev/sdb

You can then remove the USB disk from your computer, and use it to install FreeBSD on a new system.