Installing BSd

Mark Ovens mark at ukug.uk.freebsd.org
Mon May 15 11:05:06 BST 2006


Andrew Stevens wrote:
> I have downloaded all 3 disks and am trying to install bsd from 3 cd's but 
> when I insert Boot iso cd I can not get the pc to boot. Have burnt Iso 
> twice. I have set my Bios to boot from cd but it just keeps running widows.
> I have a Celron 733mz PC with 256MB of Ram
> Can anybody suggest anyting
> 

Sounds like the problem I had just the other day. I was u/g my mail
server from 4.9 to 6.1. This box doesn't normally have a CD drive so I
had to temporarily fit one and it kept booting from the HDD; if I set
the CD drive as the *only* boot device in the BIOS I got an error about
missing system disk.

I eventually tracked it down to the ambiguous BIOS screens.

On the first page of the BIOS it correctly listed both the HDD and the
CD-ROM but when I selected the CD drive and hit Enter another screen
came up with settings for detection. This needed to be set to Auto else
it doesn't get auto-detected when the PC boots - the clue was that the
CD didn't get listed in the "found devices" screen during boot.

My machine has, IIRC, an Award BIOS - the BIOS screens have a blue
background with two columns of white text with a red highlight/selection
bar.

Incidentally, just because Windows sees your CD (I assume it does) it
could still be the same problem as Windows doesn't use the BIOS to
access devices.

One final thing. Since you've d/l all 3 CDs you are obviously intending
to install from CD in which case, boot from CD 1, not the Boot CD. The
latter is intended for installing via ftp or repairing a broken install,
the tarballs needed to install the OS are not on that CD.

HTH

Regards,

Mark





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