From owner-freebsd-alpha Sat Sep 11 9:41:54 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from doorman.brann.org (remote-brann-gw.nyc.dsl.access.net [166.84.145.254]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7E3C8153E4 for ; Sat, 11 Sep 1999 09:41:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from john@brann.org) Received: from freebie.brann.org (freebie.brann.org [10.0.0.2]) by doorman.brann.org (8.9.2/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA58866 for ; Sat, 11 Sep 1999 12:41:46 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from john@localhost) by freebie.brann.org (8.9.2/8.9.2) id MAA00615 for freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org; Sat, 11 Sep 1999 12:41:46 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from john) From: John Brann Message-Id: <199909111641.MAA00615@freebie.brann.org> Subject: booting freebsd without a floppy or CD To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Date: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 12:41:46 -0400 (EDT) Organisation: Not while I'm at home X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL43 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Hi, I have access to an old alpha workstation (a 266, I think) which I'd like to try FreeBSD on. uname -mrsv shows: OSF1 V3.2 41 alpha The machine has no floppy drive, and its CD seems not to be working (attempts to mount a CD are greeted with I/O errors). I read recently a trick for booting from the swap partition, so I downloaded the boot.flp image, shut down to single user mode, dd'd the floppy into the swap partition. I then rebooted and resirected the boot to the swap partition by specifying the device node name. The message I got was 'Invalid a.out image' (I'm paraphrasing) That made me think that the boot loader could only load an a.out kernel, and that I'm stuck. Any other ideas, or is anything obviously wrong here? John Please cc me, I'm not on the alpha list. -- Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, finger john@doorman.brann.org for pgp public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message