I'm sure this is going to be obvious in hindsight, but how can I connect a usb image (not a physical disk or thumb drive) to a VM to do an installation? Specifically http://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/.../FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.img as the ISO version causes FreeBSD boot loader to panic inside the VM.
You can create en empty VM, then add second virtual hard disk into configuration but uncheck "Expanding disk" during creation process. The size of new virtual hard disk must be greater or equal to FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.img Then you need to replace contents of newly created empty hard disk. Since "Expanding disk" was unchecked it will be disk with plain raw data. You can copy FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.img to this virtual hard disk bundle as it's image or better run dd command, something like "dd if=FreeBSD-12.1-RELEASE-amd64-mini-memstick.img of= FreeBSD-1.hdd/FreeBSD-1.hdd.0.\{5fbaabe3-6958-40ff-92a7-860e329aab41\}.hds bs=1m conv=notrunc" Then try to boot VM.
thanks @mmika I'm a bit puzzled as to why this common task isnt available in the UI but I can live with this. Thanks for your help!
To install a VM from a USB disk image, you will need to use a virtualization software like VMware or VirtualBox. Once you have the desired software installed, you can create a new virtual machine and select the USB disk image as the source to install the VM from. Depending on the software, you may need to use an ISO image or VHD file that contains the OS you want to install. After the virtual machine has been created, the installation process should be fairly straightforward.
