Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 18:57:25 +0300 From: Manolis Kiagias <sonicy@otenet.gr> To: Jerahmy Pocott <quakenet1@optusnet.com.au> Cc: FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Booting to Sysinstall Message-ID: <46F7DE65.2080003@otenet.gr> In-Reply-To: <74C0DBE7-41EA-42FA-AE01-D82A9FAE3162@optusnet.com.au> References: <74C0DBE7-41EA-42FA-AE01-D82A9FAE3162@optusnet.com.au>
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Jerahmy Pocott wrote: > Hello, > > Okay so here is the situation: > Server has dead fd and cd drives, or maybe none at all. You want to > install FreeBSD > on it. > > The idea I had was to create a small partition, copy the contents of a > cd into, set it > to boot off that partition, reboot and it would boot up into sysinstall. > > Would this be possible? Or is it a dumb idea? > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to > "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" > > The problem with this approach is, you actually need to boot the FreeBSD kernel to continue with the install. Just by marking a partition as bootable, will not make it boot, and neither copying the FreeBSD CD contents will. You have to write a suitable boot sector that will load the rest of the OS, be it DOS, Windows, FreeBSD or whatever. And the fact remains, to install FreeBSD you have to boot into the FreeBSD kernel. After that it would be no problem installing from files on a FAT partition. It would certainly be a lot less trouble to connect a floppy drive, boot from it, and continue with your partition based install. In fact, in your case I would simply remove the disk, place it on another machine, do a base install, copy the CD contents to a folder, move it back to the other machine and continue from there. If, in fact, the machine has fast internet access, the basic setup is all you need. Manolis
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