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From: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu (Bill Paul)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Installing FreeBSD 2.0 with 5.25" floppy drive
Date: 24 Nov 1994 02:39:13 GMT
Organization: Columbia University Center for Telecommunications Research
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This is just a piece of (hopefully) helpful infomation for those of
you who's machines are configured to boot from a 5.25" floppy drive.
If you only have one floppy drive in your system, and that floppy is
a 5.25" model, then I'm sorry to say that you won't be able to install
FreeBSD-2.0-RELEASE unless you can beg, borrow or steal a 3.5" drive
from someone. As Jordan has already said: work is underway to fix this
in 2.1.
However, some people may find themselves in the following situation:
- They have a 5.25" floppy drive
- They also have 3.5" floppy drive, *BUT*
- The system us set up to boot from the 5.25" drive and they don't
want to (or can't/aren't allowed to) open the machine up to swap
the drive cables
If you are one of those people, then fear not: you *can* install 2.0
without fiddling with your hardware. Here's how:
1) Download the boot.flp and cpio.flp images.
2) Get two 5.25" _and_ two 3.5" high density floppies
3) Use rawrite.exe to dump the boot.flp and cpio.flp images to both
sets of disks. In other words, make a set of 3.5" install disks
_and_ a set of 5.25" install disks.
Note: obviously, writing boot.flp to a 5.25" disk will fail because
boot.flp is too big. That's okay. Just do whatever you have to do
to get rawrite to start dumping and when it barfs near the end, just
ignore it.
4) Put the 5.25" boot.flp disk in your A: drive and the 3.5" boot.flp
disk in your B: drive, then boot your machine
5) Your system should munch on the disk in the A: drive for a few seconds
and eventually present you with the FreeBSD 'Boot:' prompt. Once it
does, type the following:
Boot: fd(1,a)/kernel
6) The bootblock should begin loading the kernel from the 3.5" floppy in
the B: drive, and after a few seconds the install screen will come up.
7) You can now follow the instructions and go through the installation.
Partition your hard disk, create your disklabel, tote that barge,
lift that bale, floss your toes... whatever.
8) At the end of the first stage of the installation, you will be asked
to take the floppy out of the A: drive and reboot so that the system can
boot from your hard disk and proceed to the second stage. Do exactly
that.
9) Once the system boots from the hard disk, it will ask you to put the
cpio floppy in drive 0 (A:). Place the 5.25" copy of the cpio disk
in the A: drive like it asks, and press RETURN. The second stage of
the install should then begin.
10) Assuming there were no errors while reading the cpio disk, you should
now be ready to start loading the bindist. Congratulations: you made it.
This is the procedure I went through to install 2.0-RELEASE on the machine
I have at work and it worked fairly well. The important thing to realize
is that the FreeBSD bootblock will allow you to boot the system from the
B: drive without requiring you to change your hardware around. This is
something that's virtually impossible to do with DOS, which is probably
why most people never think to try it. So if you can manage to get the
first few dozen sectors of the boot.flp disk written to a boot floppy,
there's nothing to stop you from doing the installation from something
other than the A: drive.
Again, you must have a 3.5" floppy drive in your system to do this. This
trick just gets around the fact that it may not be your boot drive. There
actually is a way to get FreeBSD 2.0 installed even if you don't have a
3.5" floppy at all, which is to boot it diskless using the netboot.com
program. Unfortunately, this requires that you already have a running
system to act as a boot server.
My advice is to invest in a 3.5" floppy drive anyway. 5.25" floppies are
fast going the way of the dodo.
--
-Bill Paul
wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu