# install 7.x vs 8.2 drive layout + network installation question



## jtc (Oct 1, 2011)

Ok, long time old school FreeBSD 4.x user here coming back to the fold. I briefly had 7.2 and 7.3 running on an old machine, but it's since been repurposed. I tried to get 7.2 going on this old P3 I have (I have 7.2 CD's and the machine had only a CDRW drive, no DVD) but ran into a snag. The machine has a pair of 6GB hard drives in it. With linux, I usually have the primary mounted as / and the second drive has swap and /home mounted. I tried to do this with the 7.2 installer yet when I get to select the drives to use, it only allows me to select one drive, then forces me over to the slice/partitioning utilities. No matter how hard I try, I cannot get it to set up both drives for use with FreeBSD. Is this correct??? I'm now looking at installing 8.2, will I have the same issue with this installer also?

Now, about installing 8.2... I need to do this as a network install via http or ftp since this box doesn't have a DVD drive on it (I have the 8.2 iso downloaded already). I have a Vista machine on my network running Apache that I use strictly for this purpose for my linux installs. I just extracted the 8.2 iso to my http directory and got a ton of errors complaining about duplicate filenames (I compared the dates and file sizes to see if they were dupes and it looks like they were) along with a bunch of issues with .inf files located in the 8.2-RELEASE\src\ directory (i.e ssbin.inf, ssecure.inf, etc...).

Knowing this, will it be safe to try to kick off this install or should I try to use one of my Linux VM's on the same machine as a web server to host the FreeBSD files as this might be a Windows related issue?


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## jb_fvwm2 (Oct 1, 2011)

Things which if you research them might be informative: a usb image to install from rather than cdr; installing with fdisk/bsdlabel/newfs rather than sysinstall; parts of sysintall working more reliably in v7 than v8. No time to reply more thoroughly at the moment without more expertise.


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## jtc (Oct 1, 2011)

USB boot is a no-go. The machine is just that old where it won't boot to USB without the aid of a USB boot floppy or CD of some sort (is this available?).


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## wblock@ (Oct 1, 2011)

Plop Boot Manager can boot from USB on machines without that capability.

Best just to replace those ancient drives with something larger and slightly less ancient.  Second choice would be to use a FreeBSD-9.0-BETA CD install, which ought to handle two drives better.


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