From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Jan 21 19:23:41 2014 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [8.8.178.115]) (using TLSv1 with cipher ADH-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id E26A8475 for ; Tue, 21 Jan 2014 19:23:41 +0000 (UTC) Received: from wonkity.com (wonkity.com [67.158.26.137]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 7B9951001 for ; Tue, 21 Jan 2014 19:23:41 +0000 (UTC) Received: from wonkity.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by wonkity.com (8.14.7/8.14.7) with ESMTP id s0LJNdkv057955; Tue, 21 Jan 2014 12:23:39 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from wblock@wonkity.com) Received: from localhost (wblock@localhost) by wonkity.com (8.14.7/8.14.7/Submit) with ESMTP id s0LJNdhD057952; Tue, 21 Jan 2014 12:23:39 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from wblock@wonkity.com) Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 12:23:39 -0700 (MST) From: Warren Block To: Dave Ng Subject: Re: reviving old FreeBSD4 SCSI beast In-Reply-To: <20140121181241.27FF62035E@smtp.hushmail.com> Message-ID: References: <20140121181241.27FF62035E@smtp.hushmail.com> User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (BSF 1167 2008-08-23) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed X-Greylist: Sender IP whitelisted, not delayed by milter-greylist-4.4.3 (wonkity.com [127.0.0.1]); Tue, 21 Jan 2014 12:23:39 -0700 (MST) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-BeenThere: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.17 Precedence: list List-Id: Technical Discussions relating to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 19:23:41 -0000 On Tue, 21 Jan 2014, Dave Ng wrote: > So I have an older machine with a floppy drive, 4x SCSI drives, and a > SCSI CDROM. Some of the drives are bad, and I managed to hose the > userland by trying to install newer (~9.0 era, I think) binaries, > before the kernel. Or was it the other way around. Either way, I have > a machine that totally does not boot, and I am trying to revive it and > read the drives that are still good. > > I have a newer, working IDE drive I can stick in there, which should > help me out of this jam. However I still need to boot something in > order to do an install. If I had another floppy drive I could write > some boot floppies, if that is even still supported. But I only have > the one floppy. A USB stick would have been a great solution except > the motherboard is too old to support booting from USB. > Is it likely that my Adaptec SCSI board can boot from a CDROM if I > hook that device back up? > The other path I was thinking, is I could probably stick the IDE drive > in another (working) machine and dd a bootable image there. What would > I want to use, the memstick image, or disc1, or what? > The last option I can think of is PXE. Apparently this network board > supports that, since I get PXE error messages when I try to boot now. > However I have never set up a PXE server and have no idea how > difficult that is. Rather than install a new drive in that machine, why not just move the old SCSI drives and controller into a newer machine? Boot from CD or USB on the new machine, use mfsBSD or live CD mode of an install CD, and copy the data off the drives. If the old machine is the only choice to run the drives, preinstalling FreeBSD on an IDE drive is a good option. PXE takes a bit of setup, but can be useful in a lot of situations: http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/pxe.html