reviving old FreeBSD4 SCSI beast

Dave Ng chump1 at hushmail.com
Tue Jan 21 18:51:15 UTC 2014


So I have an older machine with a floppy drive, 4x SCSI drives, and a
SCSI CDROM. Some of the drives are bad, and I managed to hose the
userland by trying to install newer (~9.0 era, I think) binaries,
before the kernel. Or was it the other way around. Either way, I have
a machine that totally does not boot, and I am trying to revive it and
read the drives that are still good.

I have a newer, working IDE drive I can stick in there, which should
help me out of this jam. However I still need to boot something in
order to do an install. If I had another floppy drive I could write
some boot floppies, if that is even still supported. But I only have
the one floppy. A USB stick would have been a great solution except
the motherboard is too old to support booting from USB.
Is it likely that my Adaptec SCSI board can boot from a CDROM if I
hook that device back up?
The other path I was thinking, is I could probably stick the IDE drive
in another (working) machine and dd a bootable image there. What would
I want to use, the memstick image, or disc1, or what?
The last option I can think of is PXE. Apparently this network board
supports that, since I get PXE error messages when I try to boot now.
However I have never set up a PXE server and have no idea how
difficult that is.
Thanks!
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