old pc will not boot

[Andrew]

Daniel Finnimore wrote:

> I have intalled Fbsd from floppies and via ftp, (over my broadband 
> connection) but it will not boot from the harddrive, it keeps wanting 
> the floppies. The pc is a P100 with 32MB ram and a 1038MB Hdd. I did try 
> installing from a CD that I'd used sucessfuly before, (on a later pc) 
> but that fails to find the kernel on the cd.
>  
> Can anyone help. I did hear that FreeBSD will run in 16MB on a very 
> small disk, is this true?

Not sure how it's ended up like this, but I'm sure it's easily fixed -

1) Boot into sysinstall from floppies.
2) Go to 'Configure'
3) Go to 'Fdisk'
4) Go to the FreeBSD partition (probably the only one there, right?)
5) Press S - this will set the bootable flag on the BSD partition
6) Press W, then enter - this will write the information to the hard 
drive's boot sector
7) Remove the floppy disk and reboot! It should work now.

If it won't boot now something else might have gotten scotched during 
install, can't think what though...just go for another install, down the 
wire on bb doesn't take too long. Of course, you have checked your 
hardware yeah? Jumpers on hard drive, cabling, heat, all the rest of it. 
If the HD is recognised as primary master by the BIOS then it should be OK.

Good luck,

Andrew