freebsd 6.1 floppy installation problem - boot loader finds only 16MB, but I have 256 MB - and it hangs

[Watanabe Kazuhiro]

Hi.

At Sat, 23 Sep 2006 21:49:20 +0200,
Vo?ten?k Vladim?r wrote:
> I have an old HP NETSERVER PRO 2xpentium pro, 256 MB ram, 
> and I tried to install the actual FREEBSD 6.1 there. I made 3 
> floppies: boot, kernel1 and kernel2. When it starts booting from 
> the boot floppy, the loader show I only have 16 MB of RAM 
> (instead 256MB I have there). Then it asks for kernel1 and 2 
> disk, and boot disk again. It gives me also the entry FREEBSD 
> display with countdown - to choose boot type - default, no 
> acpi, secure etc. I tried it all, but it alwaysl hangs after about 5 
> second after any choice. So I must just reboot. I think it is just 
> because the lack of RAM, because, I think it requirets at least 24 
> MB of RAM.
> I have found something about this on the web, that it is 
> necessary options "MAXMEM=n" to use all the RAM, because old 
> BIOSes shows just first 16 MB or so, but I am just doing the 
> installation. So how can I modify the kernel on the floppies to 
> use such option during the installation from floppies? Or should I 
> install from other media???Please can you help me with 
> this??????How can I make the installation boot floppy see all the 
> RAM I have?
> Thank you very much for your reply.
> 
> Greetings
> 
> Vladimír Voštenák

Choose "6. Escape to loader prompt" from the boot menu and enter the
two lines to the loader(8) prompt:

set hw.physmem=256M
boot

See loader(8) for details.  It's the same thing that you specify
"MAXMEM=256M" to your kernel configulation file.
---
Watanabe Kazuhiro (CQG00620 at nifty.ne.jp)