freebsd on an old compaq

[joefat]

Hi Charlie

The Compaq (Now HP) Web site has a confusingly organised but very rich 
resource of BIOS utilities etc. With some Compaq machines you need to 
install a utility in order to gain full BIOS functionality.

Also, Doug is quite right, the FreeBSD boot floppies use the whole disk 
so there is no room for a dud sector. Use a new disk to be sure.

Hope this helps

Matt

On Tuesday, May 6, 2003, at 09:53 PM, clayton rollins wrote:

>
>
>>
>> On Tue, 6 May 2003 12:45:39  "Doug Poland" <doug at polands.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> > Charley <bsd at agileemmy.com> said:
>> >
>> > I recently won a Compaq ProLiant 5000R in an auction on Ebay.  It
>> > arrived yesterday and now I want to put FreeBSD on it. 
>> Unfortunately, > I can't seem to find a way to cause the system to 
>> boot from the CD and
>> > booting from the floppy returns an "Unexpected EOF" on the kernel
>> > (kern.flp).  Is there something else that I need?
>> >
>>
>> Check the BIOS for boot order or boot sequence and see if a CDROM
>> device is in the list.  If it is, make it the first boot device and
>> re-try.
>>
>> As for the floppy, I've seen the "Unexpected EOF" error because of
>> old or bad floppy media.  Try brand-new floppy disks.
>>
>> --
>> Regards,
>> Doug
>>
>
> Hi Charley,
>
> On one of the older compaqs I recently worked on, there was no BIOS 
> setting for the boot device. Instead the system looked ahead at the 
> disks to find bootable disks and booted them in the order: cd-rom, 
> floppy, HD.
>
> If that's the case, just put it in the drive and boot away. (Note that 
> the disk has to be present during POST for this to work; put it in and 
> reboot.)
>
> Peace,
> Clayton
>
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