scsi install

I have a 386 computer with a scsi hard drive and a scsi cdrom. The BIOS does not support bootable cd's. This is a problem. I am trying to install freeBSD. I made the boot disks from the image files, but that didn't seem to work. Then I tried a windows boot disk and it didn't find the scsi hard drive or cdrom. I dont have broad band so I can't use the ftp install, so is there any other alternative?

any suggestions are welcome.

Try to disable PnP and IDE in the BIOS then try it again..

I have already turned those off. I have tried a win200, win98, and a linux Red Hat boot disk. When the computer starts up its says diskette boot failure, insert boot diskette into a:. The freeBSD disk is to big to fit on a floppy, and I dont know what else to do.

>> The freeBSD disk is to big to fit on a floppy

How exactly did you make the boot disk? You need to read in the readme.txt same place where you got two image files from FreeBSD's website or CD..

>> I made the boot disks from the image files, but that didn't seem to work

The image files should work with ANY kind of install media (CD, NFS, FTP or whatever). Just grab rawrite.exe and write those kern.flp and mfsroot.flp to 2 black floppies.

>> I dont have broad band so I can't use the ftp install

You can, but not suggested for newbie.

Neither of them worked. It still has the same error message. I tried putting the images on using rawwrite.exe and fdimage.exe. They both displayed that they successfully put the image on the disk.

Do you have access to another computer with a SCSI card? Try moving the harddrive to the other comp, installing FreeBSD to the disk there, then moving it back to the 386.

>> Neither of them worked. It still has the same error message

When are you going to tell us the exact error message?

And what's the problem?

1) floppy disks
2) floppy drive
3) hard drive
4) CDRom not bootable
5) can't install from CD

Neither of the floppy disks booted. It says that there is and invalid system disk, input boot disk into a: and when I and press enter the same error message appears asking me to instert another floppy. I dont have any other scsi cards in other computers so I cant do that.

Two things:

1) Are you sure the floppies have no errors? Before writing the images on a Win/DOS machine, drop to a shell and format from there. If format returns any error blocks you must use a different floppy.

or,

2) The floppy drive is bad.

>> Neither of the floppy disks booted

Then your message doesn't really belong to BSD forum, the same thing would happen anyway for installing Windows 98.

Make it five things (only if the floppy drive wasn't even being detected):

3) floppy cable in bad position/up-side-down

4) Bad floppy cable

5) no power to floppy drive

If you can't handle a Windows installation, there's absolutely no chance you will make it to the end of a FreeBSD installation. Anyway, good luck!!

I have installed freeBSD before just not in scsi(no where near as difficult). The floppy drive did work at one time though, that's how I formatted the drive. O well, thanks for the help.