# two-stage installation?



## logicassassin (Aug 17, 2012)

K... back in the FreeBSD world after as few years off (and spending time with Net and Open BSD).

I'm looking to install FreeBSD on a machine that will act as a firewall/NAT, IDS (either Snort or BroIDS), and proxy. However, it's an older P3 machine (850MHz, 768MB RAM) that won't boot to USB, and the only spare DVD drive I have is an external USB drive. It currently runs CentOS 5.8, and the way I had to install it was to burn the netinstaller CD and boot to it, which would then hand over installation duties to the USB DVD drive. Is something like this possible or will I have to download, burn, and install from CD's?


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## wblock@ (Aug 17, 2012)

The plop boot manager can boot from USB.  So burn it to CD, boot from that, then boot from USB.


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## dave (Aug 17, 2012)

*Bootonly ISO Fits on CD*

Burn the bootonly ISO to CD and install via FTP.


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## tingo (Aug 17, 2012)

If none of the above suggestions works (but I've had success with PLoP myself) you can always take the hard drive out, put it into another machine and install on that. Put your hard drive back in, and you're ready for the next step.


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## logicassassin (Aug 18, 2012)

wblock@ said:
			
		

> The plop boot manager can boot from USB.  So burn it to CD, boot from that, then boot from USB.



thanks, tried it and it refuses to boot my usb dvd drive (it locks up hard) but that may be due to it being attached to a usb 2.0 add-in card and not the on-board usb 1.1 ports.

I'll try it again today.


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