Installation Hang

[Simon Gray]

> I'm at my wits end and if I could figure out how to simply remove the boot
loader I wouldn't be far from giving up and
>moving on to another OS.
>
> Specs:
> PIII 733 Mhz
> 384 MB Ram
> 120 GB HD, w/ a windows partition already on it
>
> Also, when I begin a CD install, after it hangs, it strangely won't boot
to the cd-rom anymore.  After I boot to the
>FreeBSD floppies, and that install fails, I can then boot from the cd-rom
again.

Hi Nick,

Welcome to the world of freebsd :)

You're problem looks interesting, what version of freebsd are you trying?

Have you setup any swap space? if so how much? You can do this when you
setup freebsd's. partitions. How big are the partitions you've assigned? is
there enough space to install what you've choosen to install?

Personally, i'd suggest doing a minimum install first, with say about 384 -
768meg swap (suggested is twice your ram), and a few gig on '/var' and
'/usr' and a few hundered meg on '/'

i've got an p3 866, with 512 meg of ram and 2x 20gig hdd's mirrored hdd my
partitions are as follows:

1gig swap

264M  /
264M  /tmp
39G   /usr
264M  /var

(although if I were to set that box up again, i'd assign more space to /var)

Should you have enough of using freebsd, you should be able to clear your
MBR (Master boot record)/freebsd boot loader by doing 'fdisk /mbr' from a
dos boot disk

Hope this helps,

Simon