FreeBSD Installation Horror

fbsd_user fbsd_user at a1poweruser.com
Wed May 4 17:53:13 PDT 2005


Your pc is so old that the bios do not support LBA in native mode.
You have to upgrade your bios chip on the motherboard. check out
http://www.unicore.com/ for replacement chip. OnTrack is designed
for ms/windows only.  In a nut shell 5.3 does support your very old
motherboard. You may have better luck with 4.11  If the cdrom you
burned for 5.3 install has only single file then you created it
incorrectly. Extended partitions are a windows thing only.  You are
mixing windows things with old bios and FreeBSD and it will never
work.

check out this install guide it may help you with creating install
cdrom.

http://www.unixguide.net/freebsd/fbsd_installguide/index.php



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Sebastian
Reichelt
Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2005 8:26 PM
To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Subject: FreeBSD Installation Horror


Hello!

As a programmer and computer science student, I wanted to try out
FreeBSD on my old computer (Pentium 166). Mainly I just want to get
to
know the differences between FreeBSD and Linux, and see whether it
really has a better design (which many people I know claim).

However, so far I have not been able to install it on my hard drive.
I
have already spent several days on this. Please help me, this is
becoming really frustrating.

I downloaded the three floppy images for 5.3-RELEASE and dd'ed them
on
the disks. Then I booted the installation and tried to partition my
hard drive. To my surprise, the partition table shown by the
installation was complete nonsense. I figured it probably had
something
to do with the fact that my BIOS doesn't support the disk size. I'm
using the OnTrack disk manager to fix the problem for Windows. So I
booted from the disk, and used the OnTrack feature to boot from a
floppy after OnTrack has been loaded. The partition table was
exactly
the same junk, though. I also tried different geometries (reported
by
LILO, BIOS, FreeBSD installation, etc.), but this didn't change the
view of the partition table either.

OK, so I emptied another (smaller) disk and tried to install FreeBSD
on
it. I have a PPP connection to another PC over a serial cable on
COM1,
which works fine from Windows. (The other PC is running Linux with a
script to emulate a modem.) So I thought I would use the same link
for
the FreeBSD installation. I selected PPP on COM1, then it ran the
PPP
program, but this program always crashes the entire computer after a
few seconds, even if I don't type anything.

Of course, then I got someone to burn me a CD. I booted from the CD,
but then the kernel said it couldn't figure out which drive it was
booting from. Apparently it had not detected the CDROM at all for
some
reason. So I had to boot from floppy over and over again. (It would
be
nice to be able to put the installation program on a small hard disk
partition.) Then I selected CD as the installation medium. Somehow
the
CDROM has some problems reading the CD; this is not FreeBSD's fault,
of
course. However, when it gets to the bad locations, usually it
reports
a page fault and reboots! Now this is getting really annoying...

By now, I have tried to get the CD burnt three times, but every
single
one of them seems to be broken at some place. With the latest one,
at
least the installation doesn't page fault any more. But it still
aborts
if it can't read some file. If it didn't do that, I would probably
be
finished by now.

As a last resort, I tried to copy the installation files from the CD
to
a disk. I can't use the OnTrack-formatted disk because FreeBSD can't
read it. So I have to use the disk I want to install to. After all,
it
could read the files, and the installation went fine. When I
rebooted,
the boot manager showed up, and asked me to press F1 for DOS (the
source partition), F2 for FreeBSD, and F5 for the other disk. When I
pressed F2, it just beeped, but didn't do anything.

I thought that maybe I could only install FreeBSD on the first
partition, then. (Although that really surprises me.) So I created
an
extended partition, copied the installation files there, and deleted
the primary partition. Oh no, FreeBSD can't read extended
partitions!
How nice: It expects the installation files to be on a primary
partition, but you can only install it on the first partition? I
think
that in the Linux fdisk, I can create up to 4 primary partitions,
but
the Windows version only supports one.

This is the story so far. Please help me find a happy end. Thank you
very much.

--
Sebastian Reichelt
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