Installing 5.2 Trouble on 486 with 16Mb of memory

[Chris Pressey]

On Thu, 5 Feb 2004 12:40:06 +0200
"igor" <igor at berill.dp.ua> wrote:

> System hangs when starting sysinstall :(
> 
> On system with 8Mb of memory, when starting /stand/sysinstall happens
> restart.
> 
> 
> 
> There is piece of install.txt:
> 
> ============================================================
> 
> 1.2 Hardware Requirements
> 
> FreeBSD for the i386 requires a 386 or better processor to run (sorry,
> there is no support for 286 processors) and at least 5 megs of RAM to
> install and 4 megs of RAM to run.
> 
> ============================================================
> 
> So, it must work on system with 16Mb of memory!

I don't remember where I read this (I checked the handbook but I
couldn't find it):

FreeBSD will run with 4M of memory, but sysinstall requires more - I
thought it was more than 5M, but still less than 16M... maybe
install.txt is out of date?

Anyway, you could try this:

- take the HDD out of the 16M machine
- put it in a machine with more memory
- install FreeBSD on it with that machine
- put it back in the 16M machine

When doing this, be careful about which device the HDD it thinks it is -
e.g, if it's the primary master in the machine with 16M of memory, make
it the primary master in the other machine too.

-Chris