Booting Problem

[Doug Hardie]

On 29 January 2013, at 20:25, doug at safeport.com wrote:

> 
> On Tue, 29 Jan 2013, Doug Hardie wrote:
> 
>> On 29 January 2013, at 07:18, Mario Lobo wrote:
>> 
>>> On Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:16:14 -0800
>>> Doug Hardie <bc979 at lafn.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I have a relatively old machine that I am trying to boot 9.1 on.  The
>>>> bios will not boot from USB stick.  I am using an external CD drive.
>>>> It starts the boot process fine and gets to the Bootstrap loader
>>>> message with revision 1.1.  Then it puts out the machine, date, time
>>>> the CD was created and starts the spinner.  It spins around about 2
>>>> times and stops.  The system continues to read from the drive for
>>>> another couple minutes.  Then everything stops.  Nothing more happens.
>>>> 
>>>> The CD is good.  I can boot it just fine using the same external
>>>> drive on another machine.  While I could remove the drive and
>>>> temporarily mount in in the working machine and build it there, I
>>>> would like to find a way to successfully boot from CD.  This will
>>>> become a remote machine and taking it apart later is not a viable
>>>> option.
> 
> What is the system you are using? What external devices does it have built-in support for? In the absence of any data - how about trying an external hard drive?

9.1 release - Generic.  Basically the disk1.  Don't have an extra external drive.

> 
> Why not remove the hard drive, use another system to put FreeBSD on the drive, and put it back. From that point on you should be able to use the network to upgrade.

I have done that before and it does work.  However,  with the various changes to the system, the root partition I had previously built that way for 8.2 is just not large enough for 9.1.  Also, I wanted to go to a single partition (the 9.1 default).  Probably freebsd-update will take me through major releases after this, but I was hoping for a better solution so I could avoid having to transport the machine a long way twice to be able to update it.


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