Thanks for the tip DES! I will probably break down and buy a cheap machine or
dust off my old P3 box. I have a PXE card at home too. I want to try qemu as
well cause if I get it to work I can tool around on my laptop.

Eric, I hate to bother you but I didn't get the cheat sheet. Here's what I
attempted last night.

I built qemu from ports I used dd to create 1G file. I did mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /bigdrive/bsdfilesystem -u 0 I downloaded the 20M boot only ISO.

I ran qemu specifying -cdrom as the 20M iso, and -hda to
/bigdrive/bsdfilesystem.

Qemu started fine, and I proceeded to go through the basic install process, at
that point it asked me to toss in the correct CD with the packages to complete
the installation (Which I didnt' have the CD handy and it was late so I will try
again tonight).

Anyway - you said you do a make DESTDIR to your mdconfig'd file. Did you mount
the file you mdconfiged? If so, does a make installworld install a boot loader
as well? I'm not clear on how you used qemu to boot agains that device.
Perhaps you did a normal BSD install on it then later mounted it to get your
stuff on there?