On Dec 28, Ted Mittelstaedt launched this into the bitstream:
Your just not going to be able to do this one as it is, you need to boot into FreeBSD in order to write a FreeBSD boot selector or boot loader on the hard disk.
Borrow another laptop and temporairly move the hard drive from the first laptop to the second, then load FreeBSD onto it and move the disk back.
Have you tried looking for a floppy for this laptop on Ebay?
In theory if you had a copy of Norton Ghost you could ghost an image of the laptop hard disk running FreeBSD (obviously you would need another identical working laptop) then on your laptop you could dialup with a modem and download a packet driver and try running it under win98 DOS using a 3com 3c89 pcmcia card (which is one of the few pcmcia cards that will run a packet driver without card services) then running the ghost client, than pulling the image over the network.
Incidentally you probably can't get the pcmcia slot to work because with a laptop that old, it's a 16 bit pcmcia card slot, and all the pcmcia cards sold today are 32 bit cardbus ones. That 3c589 3com pcmcia card is your friend. It's not in production anymore but there's tons on Ebay.
Ted
How about this one...a laptop with the CD inoperable and the floppy missing. The PCMCIA controller may/may_not be fried because no known PCMCIA network card will work, but owing to the vagaries of Win98 who knows for sure. All we know presently is that the serial port works. Disk is OK and it has 40MB of memory. Add to that the fact that for ridiculously sentimental reasons I am reluctant to part with the darn thing, so as a last ditch effort I'd sure like to put *some* BSD on it. The question is....how?
Ted,
Thanks for an enormously helpful response, greatly appreciated.
I think I'll leave the laptop on it's shelf for another few weeks/months and go hunt up a 3C589 PCMCIA card, then try yanking the H/D and proceeding as you outlined above.
Somewhat tangentially I have a suspicion that the PCMCIA controller may
well be cooked because if memory serves, I had one of those cards back when which worked and then abruptly failed. Wondering if the card itself had fried I popped it into a recent laptop and it immediately passed packets...at least that's my recollection. Nonetheless despite that gloomy outlook I'll still give this a shot with another card of the heritage you described.
Thanks for taking the time to explain the why's/how's on this, I have a clearer view of the upcoming task now.
Warm Regards & Thanks, -Colin _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
