Installing 6.2-BETA3 from floppies

[Eugene Grosbein]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 03:26:22PM +0700, Eugene Grosbein wrote:

> I'm trying to install FreeBSD 6.x onto old Packard Bell machine,
> it is Pentium-166 with 80Mb RAM and 10Gb HDD ("Orlando" motherboard).
> 
> 6.2-BETA3 boot-only CD is no-emulation one and CD loader
> cannot boot this machine.
> 
> I've prepared 4 floppy disks and tried to boot from floppies.
> It successfully loads kernel and acpi.ko and shows menu
> formerly known as 'Beastie' (now draws 'FreeBSD' instead of Chuck).
> The menu shows that FreeBSD detects that this system does not
> have ACPI and will boot without ACPI support enabled.
> 
> However, timer does not 'tick' and there is always 10 seconds left.
> I choose verbose mode, it starts to show its diagnostic output
> but last line it shows is 'Calibrating clocks...' then it halts:
> keyboard leds do not switch, there is no reaction on 'Ctrl-Alt-ESC'.

Hmm, I was too quick... The kernel has spent lots of minutes
'sitting in this pose' but suddenly said that clock calibration
has failed and it will use default frequency. Then it booted Ok
and I've installed the system to HDD using 6.1-RELEASE (I do not
have complete 6.2-BETA3 CD here but plan to do binary upgrade
over FTP).

When installation process was finished, it rebooted from HDD
but it now it sits again at the same stage trying to calibrate clock,
5 minutes are gone already. So the question is what should I do
to skip this stage and have accurate timers still.

Eugene Grosbein