Creating Installation Floppies

The FreeBSD installation DVD included with this book is bootable. If you plan to install on a system that supports booting from the CD/DVD drive, you can probably skip this section. If your optical drive does not support booting or if you plan to install from some method other than from the DVD (such as installing over a network), read on.

If you're installing over a network or if your system doesn't support booting from a DVD, you need to create three boot floppy disks so that you can boot the system with a bare kernel and minimal skeleton operating system, which then downloads the entire operating system from the FreeBSD FTP server and installs it onto your hard disk. The boot disks are created by copying disk image files, downloaded from the FTP server, onto standard floppy disks.

Caution

A floppy installation involves downloading several hundred megabytes from the FreeBSD FTP server. Be sure you have an adequate Internet link for doing this, or at least a lot of spare time if your link is slow!

You can download the boot disk images from the FreeBSD FTP server; use your favorite FTP client to connect to ftp.freebsd.org. The images are located in /pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/6.1-RELEASE/floppiesassuming that 6.1 is the most recently released version of FreeBSD. If it isn't, replace 6.1 with whatever the current RELEASE version is. The three files you need to download are boot.flp, kern1.flp, and kern2.flp. If you create the floppies on a DOS or Windows system, you also need the fdimage.exe program located in the /pub/FreeBSD/tools directory on the FTP server.

Tip

For better response time and also to cut down on the traffic load on the main FTP server, you might want to try downloading the boot floppies from one of the mirror sites, whose hostnames are generally ftp followed by a number (for example, ftp1.freebsd.org or ftp2.freebsd.org). Using a less-trafficked mirror can speed up the transfer.

The boot floppy files cannot simply be copied onto a floppy disk. The disks must be "cloned" from the disk images using one of the procedures described in the following subsections. These procedures show you how to create the boot floppies in various environments, such as on a Windows machine or another UNIX or Linux computer. To begin any of the methods described next, you need three blank 1.44MB 3.5-inch floppies.

Tip

Use brand-new floppies to create the boot disks. The boot disks write raw data to the floppies with no regard for the format of the disks or their condition; there is no error checking, and a disk with bad sectors can cause a stalled or corrupted installation. Save yourself the headache and just use brand-new floppies.

Creating the Boot Floppies from a DOS or Windows System

Open a window containing the DOS prompt (on modern versions of Windows, go to Start, Run and enter the command command). You are placed into your user account's home folder.

Change to whatever directory you used when saving fdimage.exe, boot.flp, kern1.flp, and kern2.flp. For example, if you saved them to your Desktop, type the following commands at the DOS prompt:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator> cd Desktop C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop> fdimage boot.flp a:

When the program finishes running, remove the first floppy from the drive and insert the second one. Then type the following at the DOS prompt:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop> fdimage kern1.flp a:

Repeat the process to create the third disk from kern2.flp. Finally, label the disks! (You'll be glad you did.)

Creating the Boot Floppies from Another FreeBSD or UNIX System

If you are creating the floppies on another FreeBSD or UNIX system, you do not need the fdimage.exe program. (You still need the boot.flp, kern1.flp, and kern2.flp disk image files, though.)

Use the UNIX dd utility to write the disk images bit-by-bit to the floppies. On a FreeBSD system, it looks like this:

# dd if=boot.flp of=/dev/fd0c

When the copy finishes, remove the first floppy from the drive and insert the second one. Once again, use dd to create the second floppy. On a FreeBSD system, it would look something like this:

# dd if=kern1.flp of=/dev/fd0c

Repeat the process once more to create the kern2.flp disk.

Note that for the preceding commands to work, you must have write access to the floppy device, whose name under FreeBSD is /dev/fd0c. Other operating systems might use a different name for the floppy device, or require that you use a "raw" device name; Red Hat Linux, for example, might use /dev/fd0 or /dev/floppy. See the documentation for your operating system to find out the name of the appropriate device name for writing data to the floppy drive with dd.

Now that you have created the installation disks, you are ready to begin the installation.