Installation Disc Won't Boot

[Jerry McAllister]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 03:28:54PM -0500, Derek Ragona wrote:

> At 12:49 PM 8/24/2007, lawrence.petrykanyn at sympatico.ca wrote:
> 
> >  Hi,
> >
> >  I am unable to boot from 6.2-RELEASE i386-disc1.iso.  I have
> >  downloaded it and burned it three times without success.
> >
> >  I am currently running Win98SE and FreeBSD 5.4 on a dual boot.  I had
> >  decided to reformat my hard drives so I reinstalled Win98SE and would
> >  like to install FreeBSD 6.2.  I downloaded the disc 1 iso image and
> >  burned it to a disc in Win98.  I had to boot from my CDrom to
> >  reinstall Win98 so I know that my boot priority is correct and that my
> >  CDrom is working properly.  I looked at the burned cd with the
> >  6.2-RELEASE i386-disc1.iso file on it in FreeBSD 5.4 and everything
> >  appears to be there, including a folder called 'boot'.  But I just
> >  can't seem to boot from it.
> >
> >  1.  Is there something simple I'm missing?
> >  2.  Should I just try downloading (it takes four hours) and burning
> >  more copies again?  (I've already done it three times...)
> >  3.  Is the fact that I'm burning it in Win98 a problem?
> >  4.  Is there anything I can do in FreeBSD 5.4 to see if the file is
> >  corrupted?
> >
> >  BTW - I installed FreeBSD 5.4 from discs that I purchased through
> >  FreeBSD Mall.  I thought I would do it from the 6.2-RELEASE
> >  i386-disc1.iso file on FreeBSD's web site this time.
> >
> >  Any suggestions, advice, or comments would be greatly appreciated.
> >
> >  Thanks,
> >  Larry

One thing that comes to mind, besides things other people have said.   
When you burned the CD, did you tell the software to create a bootable ISO?    
You shouldn't do that.  It is already a bootable ISO and needs to be 
burned as a 'raw' file, directly to the CD.   Having it try to make an ISO
of an already created ISO might still leave the rest of the files readable, 
so it might look OK to a quick check, but I don't know.  I haven't tried
that.

I don't know if the term 'raw' is the correct one, but definitely, you 
need to not use any option that tries to make a bootable ISO as that 
will mangle the boot stuff already on it.   

So, if that is the problem, you will have to burn another CD.  
It shouldn't matter if you burn it under MS-Win as long as it
doesn't try to create a bootable ISO from it first.

////jerry

> 
> Is the CD you burn readable under windows or FreeBSD?  If it is readable, 
> check your BIOS settings and turnoff any video ram shadow, if it is turned 
> on.
> 
> I have one older system which I thought had trouble booting the 6.2 
> disc.  I tried my disc out on another system, and saw when this boots it 
> puts up the FreeBSD boot menu, and waits for response.  After seeing this, 
> and turning off the video shadow, I tried to boot it on my older server 
> again.  This time I was seeing the bootmenu 10 second countdown, while none 
> of the other boot menu was visible.  After hitting enter a couple times the 
> countdown started ticking down, and the system booted and launched 
> sysinstall.  I was able then to do a upgrade on this server from 5.5 to 6.2.
> 
>         -Derek
> 
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