The dvd wants me to remove all empty discs before it will boot

C

Cailleach

I'm trying to bump up from 11.3 to 14.1 but am getting a response I've never seen before. The dvd disc1 doesn't display "Press space to boot from dvd", but instead demands that I remove all discs that have no operating system, which apparently means it wants to limit itself to overwriting an existing o/s. Is this something new, or have I goofed somewhere/how?
 
Given that *a lot* has changed since 11.3 I'd just start with a fresh installation (using new disks - 11.3 was released 5 years ago...) and restore any configurations from backup...
 
Of course, if you follow the releases there's no problem as you follow those changes incrementally. My desktop at home was also set up IIRC somewhere around when the 10 and 11 branch were supported (IIRC I installed 10.3 and went to 11.1 a few months later...) and now runs 13.3-RELEASE. Even skipping a few minor releases, or upgrading to the latest minor of the next major release is usually OK, but jumping 3 major releases is, I'd say "ambitious".
I would at least do 1-2 intermediate steps, but I'm not sure if the diffs needed for upgrading from 11.3 to 12(.4) are even still available on the mirrors. Usually they disappear a few months after the major branch went EOL, and the 11-branch has been EOL for almost 3 years now.... Running freebsd-update fetch should quickly answer that.
 
Alain De Vos said:
why not freebsd-update ?
Click to expand...
Because it has never worked for me. So after having hope triumph over experience a few times, I now just save off [filename]rc.conf[/filename] and do a fresh metal-up install. Which usually works fine, tho tedious. But not this time. This time I get funny messages.
 
Any reason for using an ancient optical drive instead of a memstick image? If that hardware can't boot from USB, you can also just hook up some sata SSD with the image or if there's no additional port available, you could use mfsBSD and dd it onto the disk that is supposed to be used in that system. (you'd need another system to prepare the disks for both variants)

Another ("hara kiri") variant would be to use the existing system to write the mfsBSD image onto its own disk. This nukes the systems partition table as well as any data residing on those first few (~300) MB. So only do this if you have backed up everything or you are fine with loosing all data on the disk! (I usually use this method to setup remote VPS/root servers that don't have a remote console or a rescue system and only offer preinstalled linux variants)
 
sko said:
Any reason for using an ancient optical drive instead of a memstick image? If that hardware can't boot from USB, you can also just hook up some sata SSD with the image or if there's no additional port available, you could use mfsBSD and dd it onto the disk that is supposed to be used in that system. (you'd need another system to prepare the disks for both variants)

Another ("hara kiri") variant would be to use the existing system to write the mfsBSD image onto its own disk. This nukes the systems partition table as well as any data residing on those first few (~300) MB. So only do this if you have backed up everything or you are fine with loosing all data on the disk! (I usually use this method to setup remote VPS/root servers that don't have a remote console or a rescue system and only offer preinstalled linux variants)
Click to expand...
Mostly because I'm a "satisficer" rather than an "optimiser". For me, my computer is a tool rather than a hobby, so I try to settle on doing what works rather than wrestling with bleeding-edge tech.

And I think I know what's going on, now, tho not yet why: none of the 14.1R DVDs I've burned have been bootable, which is where the funny messages have been coming from.

I've used ImgBurn exclusively ever since it first came out and making an ISO disc has always amounted to my downloading the FreeBSD ISO image I wanted and using ImgBurn's "write" function to copy it to the medium. I've burned any number of such ISO discs that way and until now none of them has failed. Now 6 tries have all failed, same problem: not bootable even though ImgBurn claims they are bootable.

To verify that the earlier burns were bootable, I booted the 12.4R ISO disc and it came up fine.

So I have to wait til the maker of ImgBurn comes online so I can discover whether he knows what's happening.
 
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