This was on an amd64 system, but it may be a cockpit error on my part, although I’ve been doing installs this way for some time.
I downloaded the CD image and transferred it to a USB stick Should have used the USB image instead, but since I wasn’t booting it that didn’t seem to matter. Then I mounted the USB stick on a running NetBSD system and cd’d to the root directory on the USB stick where I found an “install.sh” script but no “sysinst”. (If I remember correctly, the USB image has a “sysinst” and no “install.sh” in its root directory.) Anyway, I executed the “install.sh” script and began the install to a fresh disk. When it got to the point of wanting to unpack the installation files, it failed saying it couldn’t find any “.tgz” files. Looking at the files on the USB stick they were indeed stored with the “tar.xz” extension. I’m thinking now that the “install.sh” script on the CD image just ran the “sysinst” that was on the boot device, not the one on the CD image itself. So in this case mounting the CD on a running system and trying to do the installation failed because it had the wrong version of “sysinst”. That probably wouldn’t happen with the USB image itself as there’s a “sysinst” in it’s root directory which I’d have normally used. If this is indeed the case then it’s probably only a minor nit that the “install.sh” script on the CD doesn’t specifically use the “sysinst” on that CD. Of course had I booted the CD instead of just mounting it on a running NetBSD system this wouldn’t have been a problem either.
