Headless upgrade from Linux to FreeBSD

[Andrew P.]

Hello,

I've been using FreeBSD for a while - and I prefer it to all other
server OS'es, but incidentally I have Fedora Core 3 installed on one
of the servers I manage. I consulted all interested parties and they
have nothing against migrating it to FreeBSD. I've got physical access
to the box, but I'd would like it very much to make a headless
upgrade.

It's a single-Opteron box with around 130Gb on a 200Gb SATA hard
drive, the internet bandwidth is about 20Mbit/s. In fact, I've already
tried to run FreeBSD-5.3 on this very box - without any problem. There
is no DHCP/DNS on the network it's connected to, so static
preconfigured IP-address is a must, as well as a pre-configured BIND
(or at least resolv.conf with one of my external DNS-servers).

I'm thinking about creating a large hard-drive image (with FreeBSD)
and somehow writing it on the hard-drive with an in-memory dd-like
tool. Can anybody suggest a better way? Maybe I could even save some
data without backing it all up on another server?

Thanks,
Andrew P.