Re: Booting to Sysinstall
On 25/09/2007, at 1:57 AM, Manolis Kiagias wrote: Jerahmy Pocott wrote: Hello, Okay so here is the situation: Server has dead fd and cd drives, or maybe none at all. You want to install FreeBSD on it. The idea I had was to create a small partition, copy the contents of a cd into, set it to boot off that partition, reboot and it would boot up into sysinstall. Would this be possible? Or is it a dumb idea? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions- [EMAIL PROTECTED] The problem with this approach is, you actually need to boot the FreeBSD kernel to continue with the install. Just by marking a partition as bootable, will not make it boot, and neither copying the FreeBSD CD contents will. You have to write a suitable boot sector that will load the rest of the OS, be it DOS, Windows, FreeBSD or whatever. And the fact remains, to install FreeBSD you have to boot into the FreeBSD kernel. Okay, well say I used some tools to create a UFS partition, put the contents of the Boot Only iso on it and put the FreeBSD boot loader program into the MBR (it's boot0?) how could I get it to load the kernel? There seem to be a number of different boot straps, boot, cdboot, pxeboot etc, on this iso image.. I experimented with this on an existing installation and for some reason the slice I created to boot into the basic environment to install from ended up booting the existing installation instead of the version in the slice it was booting from?! ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Booting to Sysinstall
In the last episode (Sep 24), Jerahmy Pocott said: Okay so here is the situation: Server has dead fd and cd drives, or maybe none at all. You want to install FreeBSD on it. The idea I had was to create a small partition, copy the contents of a cd into, set it to boot off that partition, reboot and it would boot up into sysinstall. Would this be possible? Or is it a dumb idea? Definitely possible, but if you've taken the time to remove the drive and plug it into another machine with FreeBSD on it, you can save another step and just clone that system onto the new drive and remove any host-specific config, or fetch the raw distribution files and extract them onto the new drive. That way you get a working system immediately when you put the drive back in the old system. -- Dan Nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Booting to Sysinstall
Jerahmy Pocott wrote: Hello, Okay so here is the situation: Server has dead fd and cd drives, or maybe none at all. You want to install FreeBSD on it. The idea I had was to create a small partition, copy the contents of a cd into, set it to boot off that partition, reboot and it would boot up into sysinstall. Would this be possible? Or is it a dumb idea? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The problem with this approach is, you actually need to boot the FreeBSD kernel to continue with the install. Just by marking a partition as bootable, will not make it boot, and neither copying the FreeBSD CD contents will. You have to write a suitable boot sector that will load the rest of the OS, be it DOS, Windows, FreeBSD or whatever. And the fact remains, to install FreeBSD you have to boot into the FreeBSD kernel. After that it would be no problem installing from files on a FAT partition. It would certainly be a lot less trouble to connect a floppy drive, boot from it, and continue with your partition based install. In fact, in your case I would simply remove the disk, place it on another machine, do a base install, copy the CD contents to a folder, move it back to the other machine and continue from there. If, in fact, the machine has fast internet access, the basic setup is all you need. Manolis ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Booting to Sysinstall
Jerahmy Pocott wrote: Hello, Okay so here is the situation: Server has dead fd and cd drives, or maybe none at all. You want to install FreeBSD on it. The idea I had was to create a small partition, copy the contents of a cd into, set it to boot off that partition, reboot and it would boot up into sysinstall. Would this be possible? Or is it a dumb idea? Boot from usb-memory http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/04/13/installing-freebsd-on-usb-stick-episode-2 or use pxe http://people.freebsd.org/~alfred/pxe/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/pxe/article.html However I would choose to connect a CD-player or move the harddisk to some other machine that have a CD and do the install and then move the harddisk back. -- Christer Hermansson ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Booting to Sysinstall
Christer Hermansson wrote: Jerahmy Pocott wrote: Hello, Okay so here is the situation: Server has dead fd and cd drives, or maybe none at all. You want to install FreeBSD on it. The idea I had was to create a small partition, copy the contents of a cd into, set it to boot off that partition, reboot and it would boot up into sysinstall. Would this be possible? Or is it a dumb idea? Boot from usb-memory http://typo.submonkey.net/articles/2006/04/13/installing-freebsd-on-usb-stick-episode-2 or use pxe http://people.freebsd.org/~alfred/pxe/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/pxe/article.html However I would choose to connect a CD-player or move the harddisk to some other machine that have a CD and do the install and then move the harddisk back. I use the attach a CD Rom method on many servers I have built and it works fine unless the HD is too big for the bios on the motherboard. Sometimes you can load FreeBSD 7 on an HD on another box successfully, but if the bios on the box it ends up on will not let it run if the HD is too big. There are several options. ~Al Plant - Honolulu, Hawaii - Phone: 808-284-2740 + http://hawaiidakine.com + http://freebsdinfo.org + [EMAIL PROTECTED] + + http://internetohana.org - Supporting - FreeBSD 6.* - 7.* + All that's really worth doing is what we do for others.- Lewis Carrol ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
