Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2008 02:45:01 -0500 From: Vinny <vinny-mail-01+f.questions20081120@palaceofretention.ca> To: FreeBSD Questions <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Suggestions for PII 400 boot failure Message-ID: <492909FD.2030004@palaceofretention.ca> In-Reply-To: <E85F95E0-6238-4965-9889-6CEFACA6845F@hughes.net> References: <4926015A.3010803@palaceofretention.ca> <E85F95E0-6238-4965-9889-6CEFACA6845F@hughes.net>
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Chris Pratt wrote: > > On Nov 20, 2008, at 4:31 PM, Vinny wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> A friend of mine is trying out FreeBSD and ran into >> a booting problem. Here is his message: >> >> "Well, that's discouraging. >> >> I have put together an old PII 400 with three 20GB drives and a CDROM >> that I'd like to run BSD on. Half a GB of RAM I figured would be >> respectable. >> >> Downloaded the ISO files, burned CDs of them and when I try to run >> them it starts to boot and then freezes tighter than a muskrat's arse. >> >> Three lines coming on the screen and it ends with "Starting the_" and >> just hangs. >> > He might want to try downloading the floppy set and booting > from there. I think that is what I did on an old Dell 200 I'm > using as a bridging firewall at home. This is a pathetically old > machine and won't boot the ISO (I found it when cleaning out > my rental, left to throw away by the renter), but it works great > once you finally get the system on it. It's on 6.2 but I imagine > 7.0 will be fine. > Thanks everyone for your help, Here is a message from my friend: "Well, it's been a long day but I've had some success on the BSD front. I went to a couple of used/recycling/salvage places today looking for a PIII or low-end P4 motherboard and processor. I didn't see anything that was very interesting so toodled on home and had a cup of tea. I decided since the system was essentially running fine (without an OS) that I'd give the floppy disk install a bit of a run. So I downloaded all the floppy disk image files and fdimage.exe (the utility to convert them) and created all the necessary floppy disks. I did a simple install, paritioned the drives and created a user and administrator account along with some basic network settings. It seemed to connect to the internet just fine during boot up and when I ran ping against google.ca I was receiving back valid addressing information so it appears that that is all working fine. So I ran /usr/sbin/sysinstall from the root directory to try to customize the installation a bit better. I adjusted the "media type" to an ftp server as opposed to CDROM and POOF... Bob Shurunkel... BSD is now downloading an X-Windows interface from the internet as we (or I in this case) speak. I suspect there's going to be a bit of a learning curve here but I'm looking forward to it. It could have been much simpler if I would have been able to install from CD to being with but there definitely is a workaround which, in itself, pleases me. Will keep you posted." Vinny
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