what can i do with a 486?

[Kevin Kinsey]

deeptech71 at gmail.com wrote:

> What is LBA? Is it related to partitioning? (btw the HDD is 200MB)

LBA is "Logical Block Addressing", a replacement for the older "Cylinder 
Head Sector" (CHS) scheme of addressing data block locations on hard 
disks (and some other storage media, in the case of LBA).  It was first 
used in SCSI devices and later became a part of the ATA-2 standard; an 
old 486 such as the one you describe is probably ATA-1.  I believe the 
point a few fellows are trying to make is that during installation on a 
"new system", the BIOS uses LBA; then, when you put that disk on the 
486, the BIOS gets confused because it doesn't understand LBA, and 
reports "missing operating system" or the like.  IANAE, but I'm pretty 
sure that's what is being discussed.

> Still, wether it's HDD errors or not, why won't the FreeBSD floppies 
> work? (I have even tried them when the HDD wasn't connexted.)

On 01/18/07 17:47, you wrote:

 > 8MB RAM

That's likely the issue, although I don't remember if you've mentioned 
exactly when it fails.  The installer attempts to create a memory disk 
that's a good bit larger than 8MB; IIRC, with current FreeBSD versions 
you can't even install on a machine with 16MB RAM - you need 20+MB or so 
(which usually means 32MB must be installed).  It wouldn't get very far 
at all with 8 meg of RAM.

HTH,

Kevin Kinsey

-- 
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