cracked out floppy install

[Chris Hill]

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, daniel wrote:

> i've been trying to install freebsd-5.3RELEASE on this old computer on 
> and off for days now.  i downloaded the floppies, watched the thing 
> boot and each and every time, it'll get to the little beastie prompt 
> where it counts down and is *supposed* to run sysinst but instead, it 
> just reboots!

That's just peculiar. Maybe you need more RAM? Couldn't hurt, anyway. 
The 16M you cite below seems a bit meager.

> i even went out and bought a new set of floppies

I've found that *many* - maybe even most - floppies are bad out of the 
box. I buy the 25- or 50-pack, and churn through until I find two good 
ones. Sometimes it takes a while.

> and it still doesn't work, so i'm posting here.  suggestions? 
> comments?  here's my specs:
>
>  amd-k6 133mhz
>  16mb ram
>  4gb hd

Other than the RAM, this should be fine as long as you don't plan on 
storing much data. I'd use this machine as a home gateway/firewall/NAT 
box.

I haven't installed a recent FreeBSD on any hardware quite so - um, 
experienced, but I *have* installed 5.3R successfully on a K6-2/400 with 
196M of RAM. That was booting from floppies and installing via FTP from 
the 'net. Once installed, the thing is even surprisingly fast.

HTH.

--
Chris Hill               chris at monochrome.org
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