Trouble installing 6.1 on an old machine

[Bob]

I have same problem with my 10+ year old server boxes.

 First the boot bios scan has changed between 4.11 and 6.0. You can upgrade
your old PC's bios. In most cases the mfg does not support the motherboard
any more so chance of getting upgrade to burn the bios chip is most
un-likely. You can get 3rd party replacement bio chip from www.umicore.com
for around $80.00.

Second problem is the size of the 5.2 and newer FreeBSD install kernel. It
has gotten bigger and will not function properly on pre-2000 equipment.
Solution is to take the hard drive from old PC and plug into newer box and
do install. After base system install is completed just return hard drive to
old pc and boot from it. Will work fine from that point on.  This works fine
on my 386 cpu 33 mhz server pc manufactured in 1994 and its currently
running FreeBSD 6.1.

Good luck.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Andreas Widerøe
Andersen
Sent: Monday, September 04, 2006 6:47 AM
To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Trouble installing 6.1 on an old machine

I just downloaded version 4.11 from the FreeBSD ftp archives, burnt a boot
CD and tried to reinstall the system via FTP from the archives. This worked
perfect. No problems.

I guess this means it's not a hardware problem, but rather some changes made
to newer versions of FreeBSD.

Anyone know what I can do to get 6.1 up and running on this ancient machine?

Cheers,
Andreas

---

On 9/4/06, Andreas Widerøe Andersen <wodfer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have an OLD machine (from 1996) that's been running FreeBSD for about 8
> years now steady and reliable. It has gone through several versions and
was
> running 4.11 untill today when I decided to make a fresh 6.1 install.
>
> When booting from the installation CD the only way I can make it skip a
> lot of harddrive errors is when I boot in safe mode. I did this and
> installed the system. However, the same problems are there when I reboot
> from harddrive after the install (not in safe mode).
>
> Here are a few of the error messages I get:
>
> ad0: Failure READ_DMA timed out LBA=0
> ad1: Failure READ_DMA timed out LBA=13281487
> ad1: Timeout READ_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=0
> and so on...
>
> It ends with a mountroot> prompt.
>
> Any ideas what I can try?
>
> Thanks,
> Andreas
>
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