Installing old FreeBSD on old 486 [hobby]

T

thirtythree

This is driving my brain nuts.

Now before you say how pointless it is to do this, it's a retrocomputing hobby. I acquired an old Packard Bell similar to the one I had when I was a kid, and I used to run old Slackware on it back in 93-94.

However, I acquired a 486 DX2/50 with 12MB ram, CD drive, etc. I'd tried to install FreeBSD 4.3 on it, but it only had a stock 170MB hard drive, so I got a 250GB eIDE drive for literally $3 from some guy. Hoping to get it running and mess around with installing a MUD on it and getting it onto the internet.

I couldn't get the BIOS to recognize a HD that large (obviously), so I set it to the largest possible. I got the NIC card to work through my router and after struggling with a burned CD, I got it to install through FTP. It installed completely, but I got a Read Error on boot. It stopped after the mem test and just said "Read Error" and then sits. I tried reinstalling and switching things I thought were wrong, but it was the same thing.

I did some research and saw it probably has something to do with the BIOS even though FreeBSD itself recognizes the large drive size.

What can I do to remedy this?

Is there a way to just install the boot portion on the 170MB drive, and set the 250gb as a slave to use for the rest of the system? That way the BIOS should recognize the 170MB drive and boot, and then FreeBSD will utilize the 250GB?

Trying to get this to work is like a normal person trying to do a jigsaw puzzle. It's driving me nuts though.
 
Did you install the FreeBSD boot loader during install?

You can try (re)installing it by booting the install CD and going to the minimal livefs shell (I don't remember where it sits in the menu, it may be that it's on a different CD than on the install CD, I don't quite remember), you can then configure the bootloader with:
[cmd=]boot0cfg -B -d /dev/ada<yournum>[/cmd]

Here's the FreeBSD 4 manpage

I've used comparatively large drives with FreeBSD 4 systems, whatever the BIOS thinks is unimportant, FreeBSD will look at the disk itself (unlike Windows version of the time). What I used to do (I think...) was set the bios CHS values to something minimal like 40MB, as long as it picks up the FreeBSD boot loader you should be good.

Is there a way to just install the boot portion on the 170MB drive, and set the 250gb as a slave to use for the rest of the system?
Click to expand...

Of course. You can just assign the /-fs to the 170M disk, and swap, /usr/, and /var/ to the 250GB disk, you can do this at install time (choose `Expert install' ... you can also change it later, but that's more complex ... re-installing is probably faster).
 
The BIOS says the drive is incorrectly configured, even though I continue, the boot up recognizes it as "Disk2" but the fdisk doesn't see it at all. I'm not exactly sure what the problem is. I gave up messing with it as it's just a hobby but I may try again tonight for an hour or so.

Any ideas?
 
(I realize this is an old thread, and the original poster has likely moved on, but I've run into some of the same issues on this hardware, and wanted to leave this here in case anyone else attempts this.)

Is this one of the slimline Packard Bells from around 1993 or so (PB410/420)? If so, then yeah, the "Read error" after a delay is a BIOS problem; apparently it's making some bad assumptions about ATA timing, and the FreeBSD boot code is trusting it to do the right thing (which it doesn't). The type of drive seems to affect things, too; an old, boat-anchor Quantum 4.3 GB I had would boot FreeBSD fine, whereas pretty much everything else I tried (including a Seagate née Conner 1.2 GB from a Mac) wouldn't go.

Making the 170 MB drive root and the 250 GB drive slave should work (depending on how ATA-compliant the 170 MB is; some really old drives will only play nice with another drive of the same brand), but in this case, the BIOS should not know about the 250 GB's existence. FreeBSD only uses the BIOS for booting, and hardware this old won't do things like disabling ports because the BIOS won't see the drive.

If trying a different drive doesn't help and making the 170 MB root doesn't help, then you may have to use a SCSI card and drive (bleh, especially considering that 50-pin drives are hard to find now, and most revs of the AHA-154x BIOS are limited to the first 8 GB), or do what I did and use XT-IDE ATL on a ROM in the network card's boot ROM socket (still bleh, but 2[78]64s and programmers are much easier to find cheap than SCSI stuff!)

-lee
 
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