• boot with a Live CD
• run fdisk (if needed)
• run mkfs, For example: mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1
• mount new disk, for example: mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
• mkdir usr on new mount point
• untar a few packages into new usr/ directory (after retrieving if needed): glibc, linux-kernel, bash, ncurses, coreutils, bzip2, pkg_install, db4 (used by pkg_install), tnftp, pax, sysvinit. (Extract using -p switch to preserve attributes.)
• setup lilo.conf and run lilo (or setup grub or other boot loader)
• make sure /etc/inittab will boot up a shell for you
• run mkswap, for example: mkswap /dev/hda2
• setup /etc/fstab (including swap)
• reboot to new system
• run pkg_add on the packages extracted manually to get them properly registered
• use pkg_add to install more
• later put a few /etc/pam.d/ and /etc/services files in place, since not in linux-configs package yet.

need to do: make a simple tarball with bare minimum packages to extract and use