In comp.sys.raspberry-pi Mike Scott 
wrote:
> On 12/07/17 14:21, Mike Scott wrote:
>> I'm having problems getting freebsd to run off an external hard drive
>> instead of the pi's SD card..
> ...
>> The system starts to boot, but the loader gives expected messages about
>> umass0 followed by da0, then stops with
>>
>> "mounting from /dev/da0p2 failed with error 19"
>>
>> (device does not support operation??) and waits for a manual entry of
>> the root device.
> ...
>
>
> OK, I'll answer my own query. I finally hit on the right set of
> buzz-words for the search engine, and found the answer at
> https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/30254/
>
>
> The usb disk is slow enough to need extra boot delay before / is
> mounted. So I've put into loader.conf
> kern.cam.boot_delay="10000"
>
> and all is well.
>
> (Footnote: the loader.conf files /must/ be root-owned, or they are
> silently ignored during boot. Took ages to find that somehow loader.conf
> was owned by my non-root persona. Wierd. But all's well now.)

This thread piqued my interest enough to search for an answer. As you
imply, it takes too much sleuthing to discern the proper keywords to
obtain meaningful results.

Beings you've already done the heavy lifting, is it possible for you to
share the /etc/fstab syntax to auto mount a usb file system? TIA.

Thank you,

--
Don Kuenz, KB7RPU

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