reviving old FreeBSD4 SCSI beast

[Warren Block]

On Tue, 21 Jan 2014, Dave Ng wrote:

> 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.

Rather than install a new drive in that machine, why not just move the 
old SCSI drives and controller into a newer machine?  Boot from CD or 
USB on the new machine, use mfsBSD or live CD mode of an install CD, and 
copy the data off the drives.

If the old machine is the only choice to run the drives, preinstalling 
FreeBSD on an IDE drive is a good option.  PXE takes a bit of setup, but 
can be useful in a lot of situations:
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/pxe.html