Protip that I discovered because I fat-fingered this. Just curl | xz the image straight from the FreeBSD servers to Finnix without activating the serial console. I used:

$ curl ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/relea ... d64.raw.xz | xzcat | dd of=/dev/sda

Once it's done, connect to LISH and start the direct-disk configuration, and catch it in LISH at the boot menu (where you have the 10 seconds). Select the option to escape to the loader prompt, then type set console=comconsole at the OK prompt, and assuming no errors, type "boot".

Then login as root, and add the command to loader.conf, set a root password, and enjoy.

I wish I'd figured that out before I spent hours waiting for my disk image to extract, recompress, and upload on my piddly ADSL.

Hope that helps.