diskless laptop with no usb boot option

F

flyingnooblet

Hello, I'm trying to install freebsd on an old laptop I found in a dumpster. Its hard drive is dead and it only has 256 ram. It doesn't have bios "boot from usb" option. But it does have both a cdrom and a floppy. My idea was to install freebsd on a flash drive (usb) and to (I'm not sure about the correct terms) write the "bootloader?" to the floppy. Get the laptop to boot from the floppy, the floppy then giving the laptop instructions to load the freebsd files on the usb flash drive. Is that possible? I read the documentation both on preparing media and boot but none of my attempts have worked so far. I have installed freebsd on another computer so far and only started using freebsd 2 days ago, but I already like the idea of being to customize the os as I fit(that also kinda scares me ;) ).

Thank you.

Nico
 
As long as the usb drive is seen from the boot loader, this works. To find out, insert the usb stick, boot (from cd or floppy, doesn't matter), go to the boot loader prompt and issue the command [CMD="OK"]lsdev[/CMD]. Make a note of what devices you see. now issue the command [CMD="OK"]show currdev[/CMD]. The device shown here will be the one you booted from (floppy or cd), and it's not the one you want. If you can identify the device for the usb stick, yoy can use the command [CMD="OK"]set currdev=[/CMD] to set the device you want to boot from. For example [CMD="OK"]set currdev=disk2s1[/CMD] or something like that. After that, use the command [CMD="OK"]unload kernel[/CMD] followed by [CMD="OK"]boot[/CMD]. (I dont think yout to, but if the boot loader complains, use [CMD="OK"]load kernel[/CMD] before boot.

If this works, all you need to do is to figure out what you need to put into which file on the floppy for this to be automatic. I only use this method to boot my installation from an install cd (or usb stick) when I have messed up, so I don't know which file to configure.
 
Tingo,
Thank you for your help. I've followed the instructions and unfortunatly the bootloader doesn't see the usb drive:
cd devices:
cd0: Device 0x0
disk devices:
pxe devices:

So I guess this method to revive that poor laptop is out. Any idea on how to get the bootloader to actually see the drive?

Thank you again Thiago.
 
I actually did this test with my fat formatted usb drive... performing the install on it now to see if the bootloader will see it with the right format.
 
I don't know if grub will do it. You should try. You could also try the PLoP Bootmanager to see if that one will do it.

BTW, have you searched the net to see if there is a newer bios for your laptop? With a bit of luck, you might get usb support / boot with a bios upgrade.
 
I don't know (because I don't have a floppy drive handy to test, sorry) that it works with usb drives, but sbootmgr (for instance from here) has come in handy more than once on old machines which didn't support booting from CDROM.
 
Yes, you can do this with GRUB

flyingnooblet said:
I tried again with no success. Do you think it might be possible to use grub to do it?
Click to expand...

Yes this is doable. A detailed thread is here.

I run into this problem all the time. I collect old PCs, load them with Linux, and donate them to needy people. Very often the CD ROM readers aren't reliable enough to load an OS. Most of the time they will read enough from a CD to do a minimal boot, fetching the rest from the network or USB stick. Sometimes there's no CD ROM present at all, or it's completely flaky, so a floppy will have to be used, assuming that's available. There's some good stuff out there to enable PXE boot after first booting to a floppy.

Just for kicks I'd like to figure out how to key in enough stuff from the console to enable reception of boot files via RS-232, but even I'm not that curious. :)
 
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