Solved Possible to install 12.x or 13.0 from hard drive?

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bxbzq

Hi,
I have a 10 year-old desktop machine that has Windows 7 but running slow. Now I wanna install FreeBSD on it. The problem is the BIOS may have some problem and I could not boot from USB memory stick. The BIOS can detect the stick and I can select it as first booting device, but it just doesn't boot from the stick. I tried two sticks and neither works. Installing from DVD is not an option. So I'm wondering if there is a way to install the FreeBSD system from hard drive?

Many thanks.
 
Do you mean install (somehow) from an external hard drive over USB or something?

Or do you mean putting the spare drive in another computer and installing FreeBSD on that drive, then installing the drive in the desktop machine?

But if you've got that sort of set-up you could take the drive from the desktop, put it in the second machine, install FreeBSD onto it, and then put the drive back in the desktop.

There are lots of options but not entirely sure what you want to achieve or what you have available.
 
richardtoohey2 said:
Do you mean install (somehow) from an external hard drive over USB or something?

Or do you mean putting the spare drive in another computer and installing FreeBSD on that drive, then installing the drive in the desktop machine?

But if you've got that sort of set-up you could take the drive from the desktop, put it in the second machine, install FreeBSD onto it, and then put the drive back in the desktop.

There are lots of options but not entirely sure what you want to achieve or what you have available.
Click to expand...

I was told that FreeBSD 5.x has option that allows me put the system ISO(or maybe other type of image file) to one of primary partition, most probably C drive, and with some other simple steps the loader can load the installation image to go about the installation.
Now the desktop machine has a SATA hard drive. The option of installing FreeBSD to the hard drive on another machine and putting it back to the target desktop machine is interesting. So if I do this way, there won't be problems to boot the system even if the two machines have completely different hardware?
 
bxbzq said:
The BIOS can detect the stick and I can select it as first booting device, but it just doesn't boot from the stick.
Click to expand...
Check for a BIOS update and/or try another USB port. On my old computer, i can only boot from a certain port, the one besides won't work for booting.
 
IIRC the install memstick image is the complete image of a medium including partitioning info and a freebsd-boot and a freebsd-ufs containing the code to start the installer. So FMLU you could just dump that to a HDD, thereby restricting it's size by orders of magnitude -- but that doesn't hurt for the matter to install the BeaSD -- and then boot off that HDD and install the BeaSD onto another HDD. Gray is all theory ;) We'd need some more info on your current OS, to know which tools you have available to complete the necessary tasks.
EDIT Sorry. Win7. There's some tool to write raw disk images to a device/medium, right? Do you have that, and do you have a 2nd HDD?
 
Thank you for the good advice. It'd interesting to try one day.
There are totally 6 USB ports on the machine. Last time I tried 3 last time and gave up. As suggested by eternal_noob, I just find out there are two ports that can be used to boot a memory stick.
Shouldn't given up so easily.
 
bxbzq said:
The option of installing FreeBSD to the hard drive on another machine and putting it back to the target desktop machine is interesting. So if I do this way, there won't be problems to boot the system even if the two machines have completely different hardware?
Click to expand...
Hard disk with installed FreeBSD can be moved to anoter PC. It looks like prefered way for you.
FreeBSD usually boots correctly on different hardware.
The worst expected issue is changed disk device name.
For example 1st PC 1st HDD is /dev/ad4 but on the second PC 1st HDD may be with different name like /dev/ad12 or /dev/ada1 etc.
But it can be fixed in a moment by editing /etc/fstab in single user mode.
It is possible to prepare already installed FreeBSD for moving to another hardware, but you dont need it for fist time.

bxbzq said:
I have a 10 year-old desktop machine that has Windows 7 but running slow
Click to expand...
I doubt that the modern FreeBSD system will work faster than the outdated ten years old windows7.
What hardware configuration do you have?
 
issues with device names can be completely void'ed (is that the right term?) with labels. Usually partition labels or filesystem labels are what you want. In rare cases you can go for FreeBSD-native glabel(8) labels.
bxbzq when you can boot from 2/6 USB ports, does that mean your problem is solved? Then you can just go ahead & install with the USB thumb drive like all we mere mortals did?
 
My problem of installing the system is solved. Thanks. About the question in the tiltle, I guess the answer is no, if it means no hard drive manipulation. But I learned some interesting tricks to work around, just not tested yet.
To im, I’m not in front of the machine at the moment. As far as I remember, the graphics card is nvidia gt240, intel dual core cpu prior to i3. The 10YO age was just my guess. Maybe I could run FreeNAS on it.
 
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