Install errors on old HP machine

[Danny MacMillan]

On Sat, Jul 03, 2004 at 06:30:28AM -0600, David Fleck wrote:
>
> ...
> 
> I'm pretty much at a standstill here.  My current working hypothesis is
> that my main machine's floppy drive is writing crap, or the HP's floppy
> drive is reading crap.  I can live with that, but is there any other way
> to get something useful onto this box?  (It does have a FreeBSD-supported
> ethernet card in it.)

I came across almost exactly this same problem recently.  There's a really
old Dell at work that doesn't have the option in the BIOS to boot from CD.
It has an external floppy drive that it should be able to boot from, but
the cable has been misplaced.

If you have another laptop, you can:

1. Put the hard drive in the other laptop.
2. Install a boot manager on it that will allow you to boot from CD.
3. Put the hard drive back in the HP.
4. Boot the HP from the FreeBSD and proceed as normally.

That's what I did.  Here's the boot manager I used:

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/

You can install the standard boot manager during FreeBSD installation if
you want, or choose "None" to keep the fancy one.

-- 
Danny MacMillan