Hello from Alberta (waving to Theo, Bob, and others),
This email was meant to be short, but it is long. I apologize. Sigh.
I have a few dumb 100MHZ to 133MHZ AMD 486/586 portable computers with
PCMCIA cards and 8MB-56MB of RAM that I'm absolutely determined to turn
into OpenBSD servers this weekend or this week. They have no floppy, no
CDROM, no fans (quiet closet servers). They have old style PCMCIA
(16bit? no bumps), a serial port, 640x480 screen, and an IDE hard drive.
I have compatible pcmcia network cards that fit into them, and even
telephone modems.
Options for installing OpenBSD? The docs tell me about cdrom/floppy
installs, which sadly I don't have on this dumb 486..
And if network install isn't possible? (I have to study my pcmcia cards
and bios more to know if this is the case)..
Well I have installed Linux successfully before for these devices using
a trick:
I took the hard drive out, put it into a computer that *does* have a
cdrom or floppy.. install linux on it. When done installing, transport
the hard drive back to dumb device, and it magically boots with a
mem=8MB boot param and possibly other params to fool it. Then I proceed
to setting up the hardware that is different from the PC it was
installed on, once I'm logged in. And yes it did actually boot an log
in, don't know if it was random luck but I didn't think it would work.
Is there an easier way to install OpenBSD than this method of borrowing
another PC for the initial install? I can copy files onto the hard
drives first.. that's not a problem. The computers can already boot into
Windows 95, Windows 98, or Dos, or Linux.. but most contain Win95. I can
easily stick files on them within Windows network or with a USB to IDE
converter I have.
I was thinking if there was some program that I could modify the
partitions in Windows 95 with and create some bootable master OpenBSD
MBR.. I had this tool where I could access Linux partitions from within
Total Commander on windows once but don't think it was for bsd.
Partition Magic even came to mind, since it can create BSD partitions
AFAIK from within a Winblows system.. although I have to see if it
creates openbsd compatible ones. Again, I'm clueless here and would like
to know if there are alternatives to partition magic like an bsd capable
fdisk tool that I could screw with from within dos or win95. Or, even I
could use linux to start off with, but most have Win95 already on them.
Destroying the hard drive is OKAY.. no important data. I can always get
them running again by formatting them through my USB to IDE tool or by
accessing them as slaves in another desktop. I'm okay with hurting
myself and the hard drives in the process.
I have to find some documentation on my PCMCIA cards to see if network
install is possible. I've never done network install before and am
clueless whether my devices could do such a PXE style install. They are
EtherLink 3C589C 10 base T cards and not the newer cardbus/32bit style.
Even if they do support network install, I'd like to know if there are
other ways to install OpenBSD from a hard drive directly, using some
sort of Dos trick or MBR trick, if there is no floppy/cd available.
Best Regards,
L505 (Lars)
