BSD Installation Floppies
Get BSD up and running from a floppy disk (FreeBSD 5.2)
Posted 27.02.2005 | Updated 23.05.2006 | Contributed by Brad Robinson


If you're installing FreeBSD onto an older machine that does not support bootable CDs, you may need to create a set of floppy disks (usually two) to begin the installation process.

These floppies can be created using files from the FreeBSD CDs.

For most installations, all you need is the kern.flp image and the mfsroot.flp image from the 'floppies' directory of the first FreeBSD CD or downloadable from the NBS archives.

Depending on your hardware, you may also need a third drivers.flp image to provide the necessary device drivers.

Get two floppies and put kern.flp onto one and mfsroot.flp onto the other. These files are actually images and are not DOS files. You cannot simply copy them to a DOS floppy as regular files; you need to 'image' copy them to the floppy with fdimage.exe

To do this, copy fdimage.exe from the 'tools' directory and kern.flp and mfsroot.flp from the 'floppies' directory of the first FreeBSD CD and put them into a directory together. (e.g: c:\)

Then, to create the kernel floppy image from DOS, you'd do something like this:

C:\>fdimage  kern.flp  a:

You would do the same for mfsroot.flp, of course.

Then all you need to do is go into the BIOS of the machine that you are about to install FreeBSD on, make it boot from a floppy and then reboot, making sure that the kern.flp floppy that you made is in the floppy drive.

Simple!



- B.