From owner-freebsd-stable Sat Jan 22 14:40:24 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mass.cdrom.com (castles528.castles.com [208.214.165.92]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3EB9E14F70 for ; Sat, 22 Jan 2000 14:40:21 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from msmith@mass.cdrom.com) Received: from mass.cdrom.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by mass.cdrom.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA04891; Sat, 22 Jan 2000 14:48:37 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from msmith@mass.cdrom.com) Message-Id: <200001222248.OAA04891@mass.cdrom.com> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.1.1 10/15/1999 To: Stan Brown Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Stable List) Subject: Re: How to make a floppy to boot a kernel on the hard disk? In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 22 Jan 2000 15:07:40 EST." <200001222007.MAA29191@netcom.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 14:48:37 -0800 From: Mike Smith Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Problem i the machine is an old 486, and the disk I am trying to use is > a 20G. > > I can boot off the install disks, and get FreeBSD installed, but it > won't boot, because the BIOS is too confused to pass any useful > information. What do you mean particularly by this? Pass to whom? > Is there a way to build a floppy loader, or some sort of boot disk that > will boot the kernel on the hard disk, and mount the root partition on > the hard disk as / Yes, it should. Make a UFS floppy and install the bootblocks on it with disklabel -B. Put a kernel in /, create a /boot containing the loader and a loader.rc file that looks like this: load /kernel set currdev=disk1s1a: autoboot 10 Note that 'disk1s1a' assumes that the second BIOS disk is your harddisk, and you've installed FreeBSD in the first slice of that disk. If your BIOS is incredibly stupid, this may still not work, but it's worth a try. Let me know how you go; there are more tricks that can be played if this doesn't work. -- \\ Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. \\ Mike Smith \\ Tell him he should learn how to fish himself, \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ and he'll hate you for a lifetime. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message