FreeBSD Install Tutorial

[Ratman2]

Well Guys, I think it's about time I wrote my first tutorial....here we go

INSTALLING FREEBSD ON TO AND OLD BOX:

First thing you want to do is go to Http://www.freebsd.org and dowload the floppy images for the latest release (4.5) and the fdimage.exe tool. Once these tools are on your machine get to a DOS prompt, change to the directory where you downloaded everything, put a blank floppy in your A: drive and type in: fdimage -v <file> <drive>. the -v switch causes fdimage to tell you what it's doing. You need to do this for 2 files, kern.flp and mfsroot.flp. Label your floppies when done. Now to to your box that you wanna put FreeBSD on and boot it up with the kern.flp floppy. Swich to the mfsroot floppy when asked for it. The next screen you will see is the kernel configuration screen. Configure the kernel using visual configuration and press enter. At this point you see a whole list of device categories and an indicator that says that there are device conflicts (I had 7 conflicts). 99% of the time it will be network drivers that are causing the conflicts. Expand the network device tree by highlighting it and pressing enter. At this point you will see a whole bunch of NIC drivers that say CONF next to them, get rid of them bu highlighting each CONF driver and pressing Del. Repeat this untill all conflicts are gone then press Q and say yes to save your work. After you see the Kernel load you'll get dropped into sysinstall. Choose a Standard Installation. Next, you get sent to Fdisk. If you want to use the whole HD for FreeBSD just press A,S,Q in that order. At the next Menu choose the standard boot manager. Then you get dropped into Disklabel where you configure the filesystems, C will create a new file system. Assign 100M to /, 2-3X the amout of Ram you have to swap, 50-100M for /var and the rest of the drive to /usr. When done hit W and say yes to wrte your work to the HD. When that's done you'll be back at disklabel, hit Q to continue on. The rest of the install sould be self-explanatory. When you are done and back at the sysinstall main menu, go into Fdisk one last time and make sure the right hand column acorss from your FreeBSD partition says CA=. if it says C= the partition's not active and won't boot. If it says C> or CA> then you are trying to boot from above cylinder 1,024. If this looks ok (CA=) then hit Q, select exit Install and boot your new OS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I hope this is of some help to FreeBSD Newbies out there

[the_JinX]

Good post..
Greenies 4 u...

But next time try a [Enter]

Reads so much better ! !

[Ratman2]

an additional note:

for some reason if you don't write the partition data with W right after you do disklabel it won't make the partition active. Don't know why

[cgkanchi]

Where was this when I installed FreeBSD? Where, I say, where? Anyway, good post. Greenies for you.
Cheers,
cgkanchi

[TotalChaos(D~Sq]

Did it a simplified way.........very cool. Got my vote

[Moderator]

good post
Thanks

[Viperbite]

Thanks alot ive been needing a tutorial for bsd. And you wrote the exact kind i neaded