I can boot only the fixit CD in vary strange way...

[Alexander]

Hello,

The problem is that I have a laptop which has only a CDRW and both 4.8 and
5.0 freebsds won't boot because of kernel panic. I deal with the problem
by compiling a custom kernel on my another box then upload the kernel to a
dos partition and then when booting the CD in single mode I tell it to
load the custom kernel. But with a custom kernel there is another problem.
On the install CD (1), there is no "init" and when my custom kernel
finishes booting it just drops me into a "mountroot> " prompt, when I give
it "cd9660:/dev/acd0a" and the FreeBSD Installation CD1 is in the CDROM
then it complains that "init" wasn't found in several directories and
reboots. If I change CDs and put CD2 in the ROM (the fixit CD) then I boot
to that CD, but there is no "/stand/sysintall" there so I can't actually
install FreeBSD.

To build my custom kernel, I just get a unmodified GENERIC kernel config
for fbsd 4.8 and comment out lines 168 and 169 which are:
device         pcic0   at isa? irq 0 port 0x3e0 iomem 0xd0000
device         pcic1   at isa? irq 0 port 0x3e2 iomem 0xd4000 disable

Those two lines seem to cause the kernel to panic and fail booting.
But aren't these the ports for my PCMCIA ?! And this fails on 5.0 and 4.8 !

So I'm at a point, where the FIXIT CD is booted and there is no
/stand/sysinstall, can I make the installation in another way ? With the
fixit booted I have internet connection, I can mount some dos partitions.
Is this enough to install somehow FreeBSD ?

thanks

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