problem with booting and installing

Malcolm Kay malcolm.kay at internode.on.net
Sat Feb 27 12:13:20 UTC 2010


On Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:20 pm, david wilson wrote:
> I am using win xp on a hp laptop.
> I want to run bsd. So i get the cd burned and then
> when i reboot my system. it starts up in the usual way.
> i have tried setting bios settings for the boot device and
> nothiing seems to work. any other help please?

It is not very clear what you, David, have done!

Have you actually installed FreeBSD from the cd you burned and
find that you are unable to boot from the installed FreeBSD. In 
this case it would seem probable that you failed to install a
suitable master boot record during installation. You can reboot
from the installation source and correct this without needing
to reinstall everything. When this is done you will be asked at 
boot which partition/slice to boot from whenever the machine is 
restarted.

Or have you put the cd in your optical drive and attempted to 
boot from that in an attempt to install FreeBSD. I suspect this 
may be your actual difficulty. If so what do you see on the cd
if you mount it under XP. If it contains a single file of the ISO 
image you used when burning the CD then you burned the CD 
incorrectly. The ISO-image is an image and needs to be burned to
directly to the CD -- not recorded as a file on the CD. Your
CD burner software will surely have this option but it is not 
likely to be its default manner of working. If you simply use 
the default of copying the image to a file in some arbitrary
file sytem on the CD then it will not contain any boot code so
all attemps to boot from the CD will fail.

Or perhaps you have some quite different problem. Then tell us
exactly what you have done step by step and someone here may be 
able to help. 

Best of luck,

Malcolm


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