Booting from floppy to install 8.1

[Thomas Mueller]

> > I once net-installed FreeBSD using a boot CD from an earlier
> > version; I think it was a disk one rather than boot-only ...
> > If you use boot floppies, use only the two (or is it three?)
> > needed to boot the install system.

> If I've understood the 7.3 set correctly it's now up to five:  the
> initial boot, plus 3 for the kernel and one for the mfsroot image.

I just browsed ftp.freebsd.org, not to download anything: I see the number of
boot floppies is up to five for 7.3, and there is also a fixit.flp (i386).
For amd64, there are four floppies for the kernel, making six needed to boot,
but no fixit.flp

For FreeBSD 8.1 i386 and amd64, I could find no boot floppies.  Maybe they
could see the number of floppies was becoming too unreasonable, added to the
great unreliability of old floppies.

I see that the sets are still broken into 1392 KB chunks as base.aa, base.ab
and so on, wonder why they chose 1392 KB rather than 1440 KB.  Maybe to allow
for bad sectors revealed when formatting floppies?

> > You could look into PLoP (http://www.plop.at/) boot manager: may
> > be able to boot CD or USB even when BIOS does not support booting
> > from CD or USB ...

> THANK YOU!!  It does indeed boot the machine from the 8.1-RELEASE
> USB memstick, solving the problem entirely.  This deserves to be
> better known.

Glad to know it worked for you, and convinces me that my successful boot of
NetBSD 4.0.1 from a USB stick was no fluke.


Tom