From owner-freebsd-stable Thu Jul 19 13: 5:39 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from herbelot.dyndns.org (d211.dhcp212-26.cybercable.fr [212.198.26.211]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F3C4837B401 for ; Thu, 19 Jul 2001 13:05:26 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from thierry@herbelot.com) Received: from herbelot.com (multi.herbelot.nom [192.168.1.2]) by herbelot.dyndns.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id WAA05040; Thu, 19 Jul 2001 22:03:21 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from thierry@herbelot.com) Message-ID: <3B573D6A.3579EFC0@herbelot.com> Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 22:04:58 +0200 From: Thierry Herbelot X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.12 i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Tenebrae Cc: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Installing FreeBSD from Diskettes References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Tenebrae wrote: > > On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Joćo Fernandes wrote: > > > Thanks all for your help, I've concluded from all your mails that > > through the paralel port will be the best choise. > > Still requires a boot floppy though, right? > My question is... > Is it possible to install freeBSD WITHOUT a floppy drive? > I have a laptop with no floppy drive and a non-bootable CD-ROM drive (it's > a bit flaky - was dropped apparently quite hard in transit, but it was > free...). It does, however, have a barely working RedHate installation on > it and I managed to get the network card configured, so I at least have a > nice fast DSL connection working with it. > All the documentation seems to suggest I'm SOL. > I am hoping to hear otherwise. > So, any ideas? this may desperate, but ... if your RH partition is working, you may want to dd a FreeBSD slice already installed on another PC to a spare BIOS partition of your machine (this may *very well* fail due to mismatched geometries between machines, even if the partitions have the same C/H/S setup) you may also want to try to dd the 2.88M boot floppy image to a bootable partition of the hard disk and then try to install from the CD. One problem is that I don't know wether RH is able to slice a BIOS partition into FreeBSD disklabels. If it can, you may then want to manually decompress the install bits from the bin.?? files if you can do it, hats off TfH > Thanks. > -Tenebrae. > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message -- Thierry Herbelot To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message