Installing a new USB PCI card

R

ryladine

I have FreeBSD installed on an older machine (someone else installed the OS and I have no idea how to use it) and I need to make it support USB 2.0. I have a card left from when the USB controller went out on another machine that I no longer use, and was wondering if it would work, and how I would go about installing it.

The card is an ULTRA UM5276a-20. I don't seem to have the disk for it anymore, but I would assume it wouldn't work for this OS anyway. The card reportedly supports Windows 98se/ME/200/XP and MAC 10.2.5 and higher.
 
Try it. On FreeBSD 7.x and earlier, it might work. On FreeBSD 8.x and later, it probably will work.

To see if a driver attaches to it,
% pciconf -lv | grep -B4 USB | less -S
 
btw... How do I boot into the OS? The machine starts, and it gives me a command line, labeled : freebsd/i386 boot

I know there is a username and password on it, but I can get those.
 
Normally it will boot to a login: prompt. If it's not doing that, you'll have to check with whoever set it up.

Yes, the line shown above is a command line.

Adding the card is a first step, and supporting USB peripherals with that card is likely going to be at least a few more steps. Check with whoever set it up before proceeding.
 
I've booted into the OS, the command line is labeled #
but every time I enter your command it says :
Code: 
%: Not found
grep: Not found
less: Not found
 
% is a prompt, not typed. % means you're logged in as a normal user, while # means you're logged in as root.

That it doesn't find grep(1) or less(1) is a concern. Both of them are in /usr, which could mean it started in single-user mode.

All this means you need to find out a lot more about FreeBSD in general and that computer specifically. It might be some special-purpose version of FreeBSD, like FreeNAS. Or it might have been customized by whoever set it up. Doing anything without knowing those specifics risks breaking that system.
 
I'm not certain it WAS in /usr because when I used the cd command it was able to take me to it, though it still reports that it does not recognize it.

I can't really learn anything about the machine because the person who set it up is away in college.... I know we were using it to run servers, including a web server, and a game server, but that's about it. Are there any commands I can run to get the information you would need to be able to assist me? I know it's not a highly customized build, because the person who set it up had never used FreeBSD before.

When it boots it does ask something about the directory for shell, I don't know if that's normal or not. It has a default setting that it will go to if I press enter without giving it a directory, which is what I've been doing.
 
If it's asking for a shell, it's booting in single-user mode. Usually that's because it was shut down incorrectly.

Please look at the Handbook and FAQ.

For a start, let's find out what version of FreeBSD:
# uname -a

So if this system isn't working, what will adding USB accomplish?
 
It will allow me to install a new OS that is more familiar. I would just use a DvD drive, but that went out at some point and doesn't run anymore. (It's an older machine that's not much good for anything but low-impact servers anymore.)

I don't have anything against you guy's OS, and I would actually like to learn to use it at some point, but I actually need to use the machine in the near future, and to do it efficiently.

It's actually letting me choose what mode to boot into, it gives me about 7 options including single user mode.

I actually bothered to read above the last line, and noticed it was complaining about a directory and asking me to run fsuk or something like that, so I went ahead and ran it, it asked me if I wanted to salvage three files, I assumed that's what it needed so I told it to do it.
It tried to check blocks and sizes or something like that, and it reported a failure, something about failure read dma_status 51 (other stuff) error 40 this repeated a few times through the process

it also said cannot read blk:169936320

then it reported it could not read a sector of the disk..... I'm going to stop you from saying that it's probably HD failure, because I already know that... I'm fortunate enough it has two, so I'm hoping it was reading the HD the OS isn't on... or it was a nonessential sector.

It also reported a lot of unexpected soft update inconsistencies throughout the entire process, a few on files I know were put in as part of the servers it was running.

it reported some blk's were missing and such, then finished.

it asked me to run it again, but I decided to restart first and see what happened, the first message about the boot didn't pop up after I restarted.
Ah! And it's asking me to login finally, so I assume whatever the problem it had was fixed. Now I just need to get that username and password....
 
If you're just going to install something else, there's no reason to mess around with the existing install.

Choose the boot menu from the BIOS startup, pick your USB (or other) bootable device with the install disk. That's all.
 
Alright! I was able to boot into the user, and use the first command you sent successfully!

Also, the OS is FreeBSD 8.1

Ah, thanks for the help then.
 
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