Minimal system installation

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Your just not going to be able to do this one as it is,
you need to boot into FreeBSD in order to write a FreeBSD
boot selector or boot loader on the hard disk.

Borrow another laptop and temporairly move the hard drive from
the first laptop to the second, then load FreeBSD onto it
and move the disk back.

Have you tried looking for a floppy for this laptop on
Ebay?

In theory if you had a copy of Norton Ghost you could ghost
an image of the laptop hard disk running FreeBSD (obviously
you would need another identical working laptop) then 
on your laptop you could dialup with a modem and download
a packet driver and try running it under win98 DOS using a
3com 3c89 pcmcia card (which is one of the few pcmcia cards
that will run a packet driver without card services) then
running the ghost client, than pulling the image over the
network.

Incidentally you probably can't get the pcmcia slot to work
because with a laptop that old, it's a 16 bit pcmcia card
slot, and all the pcmcia cards sold today are 32 bit cardbus
ones.  That 3c589 3com pcmcia card is your friend.  It's not
in production anymore but there's tons on Ebay.

Ted

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Colin J. Raven
> Sent: Monday, December 27, 2004 2:17 PM
> To: Dinesh Nair
> Cc: Greg 'groggy' Lehey; Dan Thomas; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Minimal system installation
> 
> 
> On Dec 28, Dinesh Nair launched this into the bitstream:
> 
> > On 28/12/2004 05:08 Greg 'groggy' Lehey said the following:
> >> On Monday, 27 December 2004 at 13:21:51 -0600, Dan Thomas wrote:
> >> 
> >>> A friend gave me a laptop with a Pentium 100 and 24 megs of ram.  It
> >>> only has a floppy drive.  What version of FreeBSD do you recommend
> >>> and would you send me the link to download it.
> >> 
> >> 
> >> It's possible to run FreeBSD on a machine like that (in fact, I intend
> >> to start doing so on a very similar machine today), but only as a
> >> diskless workstation.  FreeBSD needs a disk *somewhere*.  If this is
> >> all you have, you can't run FreeBSD on it.
> >
> > but you should be able to run PicoBSD on it. ;)
> >
> How about this one...a laptop with the CD inoperable and the floppy 
> missing. The PCMCIA controller may/may_not be fried because no known 
> PCMCIA network card will work, but owing to the vagaries of Win98 who 
> knows for sure. All we know presently is that the serial port works. 
> Disk is OK and it has 40MB of memory. Add to that the fact that for 
> ridiculously sentimental reasons I am reluctant to part with the darn 
> thing, so as a last ditch effort I'd sure like to put *some* BSD on it. 
> The question is....how?
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to 
> "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>