reviving old FreeBSD4 SCSI beast

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 01/21/14 12:12, 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.
> Thanks!
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SCSI CD drives should be perfectly bootable.
-Nathan