You generally need just one floppy image, the floppies/boot.flp file, which you image-copy onto a 1.44MB floppy and then boot it in order to download the rest (and the installation will manage your TCP/IP collection, deal with tapes, CDROMs, floppies, DOS. partitions, whatever's necessary to get the reset of the bits installed).
If you need to download the distributions yourself (for a DOS
filesystem install, for instance), below are some recommendations
for distributions to grab:
Full instructions on this procedure and a little bit more about
installation issues in general can be found in the Installation instructions can be found in the
You'll need a 386 or better PC, with 5 MB or more of RAM and at
least 60 MB of hard disk space. It can run with a low end MDA
graphics card but to run X11R6, a VGA or better video card is needed.
See also the section on
FreeBSD 2.1.7 was the last version of FreeBSD that could be installed
on a 4MB system. Newer versions of FreeBSD, like 2.2, need at least 5MB
to install on a new system.
All versions of FreeBSD, including 3.0, will RUN in 4MB of ram, they
just can't run the installation program in 4MB. You can add
extra memory for the install process, if you like, and then
after the system is up and running, go back to 4MB. Or you could
always just swap your disk into a system which has >4MB, install onto
it and then swap it back.
There are also situations in which FreeBSD 2.1.7 will not install
in 4 MB. To be exact: it does not install with 640 kB base + 3 MB
extended memory. If your motherboard can remap some of the ``lost''
memory out of the 640kB to 1MB region, then you may still be able
to get FreeBSD 2.1.7 up.
Try to go into your BIOS setup and look for a ``remap'' option.
Enable it. You may also have to disable ROM shadowing.
It may be easier to get 4 more MB just for the install. Build a
custom kernel with only the options you need and then get the 4
MB out again.
You may also install 2.0.5 and then upgrade your system to 2.1.7
with the ``upgrade'' option of the 2.1.7 installation program.
After the installation, if you build a custom kernel, it will run
in 4 MB. Someone has even succeeded in booting with 2 MB (the
system was almost unusable though :-))
Currently there's no way to *just* make a custom install floppy.
You have to cut a whole new release, which will include your install
floppy. There's some code in /usr/src/release/floppies/Makefile
that's supposed to let you *just* make those floppies, but it's not
really gelled yet.
To make a custom release, follow the instructions .
Have a look at Install Windows 95 first, after that FreeBSD. FreeBSD's boot
manager will then manage to boot Win95 and FreeBSD. If you
install Windows 95 second, it will boorishly overwrite your
boot manager without even asking. If that happens, see
the next section.
You can reinstall the boot manager FreeBSD comes with in one of
two ways:
and the boot manager will be reinstalled.
FreeBSD's bad block (the If you have a SCSI drive with bad blocks, see .
If you're seeing things like the machine grinding to a halt or
spontaneously rebooting when you try to boot the install floppy,
here are three questions to ask yourself:-
There have also been reports of Netscape causing problems when
downloading the boot floppy, so it's probably best to use a different
FTP client if you can.
If you are installing 2.1.7R from tape, you must create the tape
using a tar blocksize of 10 (5120 bytes). The default tar
blocksize is 20 (10240 bytes), and tapes created using this
default size cannot be used to install 2.1.7R; with these tapes,
you will get an error that complains about the record size being
too big.
Connect the two computers using a Laplink parallel cable to use
this feature:
See also on the Mobile Computing page.
(By the "geometry" of a disk, we mean the number of cylinders,
heads and sectors/track on a disk - I'll refer to this as
C/H/S for convenience. This is how the PC's BIOS works out
which area on a disk to read/write from).
This seems to cause a lot of confusion for some reason. First
of all, the All that matters is the For SCSI disks, the geometry to use depends on whether extended
translation support is turned on in your controller (this is
often referred to as "support for DOS disks >1GB" or something
similar). If it's turned off, then use N cylinders, 64 heads
and 32 sectors/track, where 'N' is the capacity of the disk in
MB. For example, a 2GB disk should pretend to have 2048 cylinders,
64 heads and 32 sectors/track.
If it If you are not sure about this, or FreeBSD fails to detect the
geometry correctly during installation, the simplest way around
this is usually to create a small DOS partition on the disk. The
correct geometry should then be detected (and you can always remove
the DOS partition in the partition editor if you don't want to keep
it, or leave it around for programming network cards and the like).
Alternatively, there is a freely available utility distributed with
FreeBSD called ``tools
subdirectory on the FreeBSD CDROM or on the various FreeBSD
ftp sites) which can be used to work out what geometry the other
operating systems on the disk are using. You can then enter this
geometry in the partition editor.
Yes. You must make sure that your root partition is below 1024
cylinders so the BIOS can boot the kernel from it. (Note that this
is a limitation in the PC's BIOS, not FreeBSD).
For a SCSI drive, this will normally imply that the root partition
will be in the first 1024MB (or in the first 4096MB if extended
translation is turned on - see previous question). For IDE, the
corresponding figure is 504MB.
FreeBSD recognizes the Ontrack Disk Manager and makes allowances
for it. Other disk managers are not supported.
If you just want to use the disk with FreeBSD you don't need a
disk manager. Just configure the disk for as much space as the
BIOS can deal with (usually 504 megabytes), and FreeBSD
should figure out how much space you really have. If you're using
an old disk with an MFM controller, you may need to explicitly
tell FreeBSD how many cylinders to use.
If you want to use the disk with FreeBSD and another operating
system, you may be able to do without a disk manager: just make sure
the the FreeBSD boot partition and the slice for the other
operating system are in the first 1024 cylinders. If you're
reasonably careful, a 20 megabyte boot partition should be plenty.
This is classically a case of FreeBSD and DOS or some other OS
conflicting over their ideas of disk You will have to reinstall FreeBSD, but obeying the
instructions given above will almost always get you going.
This is another symptom of the problem described in the preceding
question. Your BIOS geometry and FreeBSD geometry settings do
not agree! If your controller or BIOS supports cylinder
translation (often marked as ``>1GB drive support''), try
toggling its setting and reinstalling FreeBSD.
Apart from performance issues, no. FreeBSD 2.X comes with bounce
buffers which allow your bus mastering controller access to greater
than 16MB. (Note that this should only be required if you are using
ISA devices, although one or two broken EISA and VLB devices may
need it as well).