Minimal system installation

[Nikolas Britton]

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

>Your just not going to be able to do this one as it is,
>you need to boot into FreeBSD in order to write a FreeBSD
>boot selector or boot loader on the hard disk.
>
>Borrow another laptop and temporairly move the hard drive from
>the first laptop to the second, then load FreeBSD onto it
>and move the disk back.
>
>Have you tried looking for a floppy for this laptop on
>Ebay?
>
>In theory if you had a copy of Norton Ghost you could ghost
>an image of the laptop hard disk running FreeBSD (obviously
>you would need another identical working laptop) then 
>on your laptop you could dialup with a modem and download
>a packet driver and try running it under win98 DOS using a
>3com 3c89 pcmcia card (which is one of the few pcmcia cards
>that will run a packet driver without card services) then
>running the ghost client, than pulling the image over the
>network.
>
>Incidentally you probably can't get the pcmcia slot to work
>because with a laptop that old, it's a 16 bit pcmcia card
>slot, and all the pcmcia cards sold today are 32 bit cardbus
>ones.  That 3c589 3com pcmcia card is your friend.  It's not
>in production anymore but there's tons on Ebay.
>
>Ted
>
>  
>
>>How about this one...a laptop with the CD inoperable and the floppy 
>>missing. The PCMCIA controller may/may_not be fried because no known 
>>PCMCIA network card will work, but owing to the vagaries of Win98 who 
>>knows for sure. All we know presently is that the serial port works. 
>>Disk is OK and it has 40MB of memory. Add to that the fact that for 
>>ridiculously sentimental reasons I am reluctant to part with the darn 
>>thing, so as a last ditch effort I'd sure like to put *some* BSD on it. 
>>The question is....how?
>>    
>>
You have ONE option (with many adaptations):

In all cases you are going to have to remove the hard drive from the 
laptop and do the install from another system with working floppy and 
cd-rom drives:

You can do it from another laptop.
You can do it from a desktop if you have a 2.5 to 3.5 IDE converter cable.
You can do it from VMware* (and maybe bochs) if you have a 2.5 
USB/Firewire/whatever external drive.

*If you do it from VMware remember to change fstab as VMware emulates 
IDE as SCSI so your mount points will be pointing to the wrong type of disk.

After you do this invest in a 16-bit PCMCIA NIC card (3com 589x, linksys 
PCMPC100).