cracked out floppy install

Kris Kennaway kris at obsecurity.org
Mon Feb 7 20:03:34 PST 2005


On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 10:52:53PM -0500, daniel wrote:
> On February 7, 2005 10:40 pm, Chris Hill wrote:
> > On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, daniel wrote:
> > > i've been trying to install freebsd-5.3RELEASE on this old computer on
> > > and off for days now.  i downloaded the floppies, watched the thing
> > > boot and each and every time, it'll get to the little beastie prompt
> > > where it counts down and is *supposed* to run sysinst but instead, it
> > > just reboots!
> >
> > That's just peculiar. Maybe you need more RAM? Couldn't hurt, anyway.
> > The 16M you cite below seems a bit meager.
> 
> well the handbook says freebsd5 has a minimum requirement of 8mb, so 16 should 
> be fine.  but even if it weren't, you'd think there'd be some form of useful 
> error message instead of just rebooting.  it just makes no sense.

In practise no-one tests running on minuscule-memory configurations,
so it's possible that 8mb or even 16mb is not in fact enough thesedays.

Anyway, it's possible something else is wrong.  Did you try the other
boot modes, e.g. disabling acpi, running in 'safe mode', etc?  In
particular, many older systems have buggy BIOS implementations that do
not allow them to run with acpi, even though the BIOS thinks they can.

Kris
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