Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Martin Nilsson]

Scott Long wrote:
> FreeBSD/i386 is the only port left that generates install floppies.
> Their primary purpose is to fascilitate installing FreeBSD on systems
> where a CDROM is either not available or is incompatible with the
> 'Non-Emulated El Torito' boot method that we use on our CDs.  Systems that
> cannot boot these CDs are typically those that are also not certified for
> WinNT4, Win2K, or WinXP.  Thus, nearly all machines produced after 1997
> can boot our CDs.

Are you aware that the FreeBSD CD:s (both 4.9 & 5.2) are not bootable on 
a CD-ROM connected via USB? Both try to boot but hangs somewhere in the 
loader. This is on our P4 Supermicro serverboards. As usual Win2K, 2K3 & 
RedHat just works. An external USB2.0 connected Asus CD-RW drive 
(52x/24x/52x) with power supply costs about $70 so this is really 
nothing expensive or fancy today.

If anybody can give me directions on how to debug this I'm willing to help.
	/Martin
-- 
Martin Nilsson, CTO & Founder, Mullet Scandinavia AB, Malmö, SWEDEN
E-mail: martin at mullet.se, Phone: +46-(0)708-606170, http://www.mullet.se

Our business is well engineered servers optimized for FreeBSD and Linux.