Date: Tue, 01 Sep 1998 17:48:29 -0500 From: "Steve Friedrich" <SteveFriedrich@Hot-Shot.com> To: "Roman Katsnelson" <romank@graphnet.com> Cc: "FreeBSD Questions" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Unique question...... Message-ID: <199809012148.RAA15690@laker.net>
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On Tue, 01 Sep 1998 16:33:02 -0400, Roman Katsnelson wrote: >Steve Friedrich wrote: >> >> On Tue, 01 Sep 1998 11:57:00 -0700 (PDT), William Woods wrote: >> >> >What I want to do is this, blow away win95 and install freebsd. There is no way >> >to make a boot floppy for it (it has no floppy drive) so, I am at a loss how to >> >do this.....any ideas appreciated. >> >> Here's a couple options: >> 1. Find another machine (at work? a friend?) that has DOS/Winblows or >> some variant of unix on it, that also has Internet access. Connect to >> www.freebsd.org and read the docs to make a boot floppy. Note that the >> procedure will vary according to the system you found as a surrogate. >> 2. Find another machine (at work? a friend?) that has a CDROM drive, >> acquire the CDROM distribution (and preferably the book The Complete >> FreeBSD from Walnut Creek (www.cdrom.com). > >what i would do, if buying a cdrom drive and/or a floppy drive is out of >the question is just put the hard drive in another machine, install a >fully functional system on there, put it back in the laptop, boot up and >reconfigure the kernel (not that i know how to reconfigure a kernel ;) This is a pretty good idea. One thing to consider though is that most laptops have very small drives that probably can't be mounted in a desktop case. You can temporarily sit the drive on something stable, but beware of it falling, etc. And it might be a little tough to get even a friend to let you go that deep into his machine, especially if you've never taken a cover off a computer before. Having said all that, I'll probably use this technique myself (I've done similar things in the past, didn't pop to my mind this time). As for making your own custom kernel, you should learn how because a custom kernel is frequently half the size of GENERIC and will boot faster because it will only contain the devices you actually have and won't waste so much time probing for all the devices in GENERIC. A quick tour: cd to /sys/i386/conf if the directory doesn't exist, you haven't installed the kernel sources (go to /stand/sysinstall and select configure...distributions... and find the kernel sources and install them) in /sys/i386/conf copy the GENERIC file to a filename of your liking, i.e., cp GENERIC MYKERNEL using any plain text editor (like vi, emacs, textedit), edit MYKERNEL. You need to know what devices have been detected in your system. You can use "dmesg>log" to put the boot messages into a log file. Then just look for lines containing irq and/or "at 0x???". The hex numbers "0x???" are i/o addresses. Most devices have several possibilities. Comment out the lines in MYKERNEL for devices you don't have. Say you have an adaptec SCSI controller, comment out the lines for NCR, etc. Do the same for NICs. You can comment out a few lines at a time, such as all the NICs except the one you think is correct for you, and build a kernel and boot it. Then, if it seems ok, de-configure some more devices, build again, boot again, etc. This is step-wise refinement. Even those who have been wrestling with computers for twenty odd years do it, so don't think it's macho to get it right first time thru. After editing the MYKERNEL file, do a config on it; config MYKERNEL It only takes a couple minutes, generally. Then cd ../../compile/MYKERNEL and then invoke make make This stage will take some time, but it keeps outputting messages, so at least you know it's not "hung". If the make completes successfully (you'll know), then invoke make with the install target. make install This puts the new kernel in / as kernel and renames the previous kernel as kernel.old. Go rename kernel.old to kernel.GENERIC (if kernel.GENERIC doesn't already exist) because each time you make a kernel, kernel.old gets overwritten with kernel. You don't want to lose a kernel that you know will boot. Then reboot. This stuff is in The Complete FreeBSD, and you really should get a copy, if you don't have one. I've been wrestling computers of all shapes and sizes for 22yrs, and I found the book indispensable. This stuff is probably in the handbook, but I haven't looked... To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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