Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 10:42:27 +0000 From: David Goddard <d.m.goddard@ic.ac.uk> To: Sandip Srivastava <ssriva1@umbc.edu> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: How to install to 2nd IDE drive? Message-ID: <9603281049.AA11628@mism.ad.ic.ac.uk>
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At 23:28 27/03/96 -0500, you wrote: >I am trying to install freebsd to my 2nd hard drive. My 1st drive is >completely DOS/Windows. How do I install freebsd on my 2nd drive? I Is your second drive empty? If so, just run the normal installation procedure from the boot.flp disk, using the fdisk section to allocate all of the second disk to FreeBSD. FreeBSD 2.1 doesn't seem to like installing to a second IDE drive - I had problems and I know others also had. I had a combination of my boot manager being trashed and my reinstalled boot manager not seeing FreeBSD. What I eventually did was install a small root partition on my first drive and the rest on the second, but looking back there are probably other ways.. Make sure you tell the installation to install the boot manager on both disks.. >also have a PS/2 mouse. Do I need to recompile the kernel to get it to >work? Probably, yes. >To boot freebsd, do I have to boot from the 1st drive or can I boot from >a floppy? If I can boot from a floppy into freebsd, how do I create the >boot floppy. I haven't found a way to directly do this yet, but you can boot bsd without the boot manager.. There is a file on the CD & in the FTP sites called fbsdboot.exe.uu. This will boot FreeBSD when run from DOS. Download it, uudecode it and put it on your DOS drive. Make a bootable DOS floppy and boot DOS from that. Run fbsdboot.exe and hey presto you have bsd running. I'm suggesting booting from a DOS floppy because some of your regular DOS startup items may pevent it from working.. >I don't mind booting from my 1st disk as long as this wont >corrupt my first disk and the DOS operating system on it. Do I need to >create some Boot Manager on the first drive in order to do this? If I >do, then is it safe to do this? If I do this, will I be able to return >my first drive to its original configuration without any problem, that is >take off the boot manager for freebsd off of the first drive so that goes >back to the way it was before? The most important thing is to make backups - the whole of your existing filesystem if you can - you can never guarantee that something won't go wrong... The DOS utility FDISK will make a backup of your original boot sector when you change it, as will most programs that change the boot sector. Before you install, make a bootable DOS floppy with FDISK and a copy of your original boot sector on it. If things go wrong, you can boot from this and restore your old boot. A good source of information apart from the handbook and FAQ (which do have large holes) is the questions archive - http://www.freebsd.org/search.html. That's where I got most of the info to help me through my installation problems. Don't tell anyone but the Linux HowTo's are quite useful as well ;-) Dave -- David Goddard Management Information Services, Imperial College, London SW7 2AZ, UK Telephone: +44 (0)171 594 7282, Fax: +44 (0)171 594 7277 If it can go wrong, it wSegmentation fault (core dumped)
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