# 32-bit installation problems.



## JoeInwap (May 9, 2021)

Installing from FreeBSD-12.2-RELEASE-i386-dvd1.iso (2020-10-23) on a 32-bit Pentium-III>with 256MB of memory.


```
CD Loader 1.2
Building the boot loader arguments
Looking up /BOOT/LOADER... Found
Relocating the loader and the BTX
Starting the BTX loader

BTX loader 1.00  BTX version is 1.02
Consoles: internal video/keyboard
BIOS CD is cd0
BIOS drive A: is fd0
BIOS drive C: is disk0
BIOS 637kB/261056kB available memory

FreeBSD/x86 bootstrap loader, Revision 1.1
ERROR: cannot open /boot/lua/loader.lua: no such file or directory

Type '?' for a list of commands, 'help' for more detailed help.
OK ls /boot
/boot
OK
```
The hardware is a Sony Vaio Notebook Computer, model PDG-9332, circa 2000.  It can boot older versions of Knoppix from DVD, but not FreeBSD i386 from DVD. (Its ancient BIOS cannot be told boot from a USB memory stick.)

Edit 2021-06-04: The DVD1 image is defective.  Required boot programs are missing.
The DISK1 image is too big; it will not fit on a 704 MB CD blank.  USB does not work for me.


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## a6h (May 9, 2021)

JoeInwap said:


> Installing from FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-i386-dvd1.iso





JoeInwap said:


> Same thing but with 12.2-RELEASE-i386.dvd1 (2020-10-23)


What's the installation medium? DVD or USB Flash?


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## JoeInwap (May 10, 2021)

Laptop does not do flash.  It is a DVD install.


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## SirDice (May 10, 2021)

It doesn't have a DVD drive  either, so I assume it's an external DVD device? And it should be able to boot from an USB stick.

Note that with 13.0-RELEASE i386 is now Tier 2.


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## balanga (May 10, 2021)

JoeInwap said:


> Laptop does not do flash.  It is a DVD install.


Do you have another computer? Maybe you can take out the hard drive of your notebook add put it in a USB enclosure... Although the disk is likely to have an IDE connector so it's worth finding an appropriate enclosure like this one...









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## JoeInwap (May 11, 2021)

SirDice said:


> It doesn't have a DVD drive  either, so I assume it's an external DVD device? And it should be able to boot from an USB stick.
> 
> Note that with 13.0-RELEASE i386 is now Tier 2.


This laptop most certainly does have a DVD-ROM drive.  Laptops from 1999 don't boot from USB.


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## JoeInwap (May 11, 2021)

balanga said:


> Do you have another computer? Maybe you can take out the hard drive of your notebook add put it in a USB enclosure... Although the disk is likely to have an IDE connector so it's worth finding an appropriate enclosure like this one...
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Thanks, but it appears that the DVD image is incomplete.  It gives me the impression that no one has been able to boot from this DVD.  I hope to be proved wrong.


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## SirDice (May 11, 2021)

Try the disc1 image on a "regular" CD. Apparently the DVD image doesn't actually fit on a DVD. To be honest I never use the DVD, it only contains a bunch of packages as extra. And those packages are now out of date in any case, so you might as well just download the packages directly from the repositories and skip the ones that came on the DVD.


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## astyle (May 11, 2021)

My first thought was that the laptop doesn't have enough RAM. But after doing some homework on official docs, looks like that should not be the case. OP mentioned that the laptop can boot older versions of Knoppix. And now my thinking goes, a more reliable way to get FreeBSD to even boot is to find an older version that boots, install that, and keep upgrading until you get to FreeBSD 13. I know this will take a lot of time,  doing homework on proper upgrade procedures for EVERY stinkin' version until you get to 13, but it should be a reliable path. OP very well may discover that 13 is not even possible, but an older version just might be.


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## SirDice (May 11, 2021)

astyle said:


> doing homework on proper upgrade procedures for EVERY stinkin' version until you get to 13


It's not necessary to do all the intermediate versions in between. You can upgrade directly to 13.0.


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## astyle (May 11, 2021)

SirDice said:


> It's not necessary to do all the intermediate versions in between. You can upgrade directly to 13.0.


I think there's a limit on how far back you can go.... I haven't done my research in this case, but I vaguely recall seeing info that you can only go as far back as 8.0-RELEASE if you want a direct upgrade to 13-RELEASE.  If the laptop only boots on something older than that, multi-stage upgrading is unavoidable.


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## SirDice (May 11, 2021)

astyle said:


> I think there's a limit on how far back you can go


There was a point in time when freebsd-update(8) didn't exist (and thus the files for it don't exist either). That might indeed have been 8.0 I'm not exactly sure. But there's no point in going back that far. If you can't get it to boot with 11 then it's better to just give up. 



astyle said:


> If the laptop only boots on something older than that, multi-stage upgrading is unavoidable.


I wouldn't even attempt to upgrade a system that old. Too much has changed in the mean time. Notably disk partition sizes, you're bound to run out of disk space with those older installs.


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## covacat (May 11, 2021)

you can create a frankenstein cd with the loader from 11.x or earlier and the rest from 13
just had the surprise that pxeboot from 13.0-R install cd bombs on 3 different boxes (but works in virtualbox guest)
booting with pxeboot from 11.4-R works (box characters in the loader menu are fscked but it at least it boots)


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## astyle (May 11, 2021)

covacat said:


> you can create a frankenstein cd with the loader from 11.x or earlier and the rest from 13
> just had the surprise that pxeboot from 13.0-R install cd bombs on 3 different boxes (but works in virtualbox guest)
> booting with pxeboot from 11.4-R works (box characters in the loader menu are fscked but it at least it boots)


I would discourage something that complicated.


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## bookwormep (May 11, 2021)

What CPU are you using? I used to have three different i386 boxes running FreeBSD a few years ago and some of them stopped working altogether, These were Intel Pentium-III and there was some code incompatibly which no longer worked with FreeBSD ("ia-64" I believe, but I could be wrong).


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## astyle (May 11, 2021)

JoeInwap said:


> 32-bit Pentium-III


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## SirDice (May 11, 2021)

bookwormep said:


> ("ia-64" I believe, but I could be wrong)


IA-64 is Intel's failed attempt at a 64 bit architecture, the Intel Itanium. It mostly failed because it was incompatible with existing 32 bit systems. AMD64 was an _extension_ to the existing IA-32 (x86) instruction set, making those CPUs backwards compatible. This proved to be a more successful move and Intel copied it to their CPUs as Intel 64.


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## JoeInwap (May 13, 2021)

SirDice said:


> Try the disc1 image on a "regular" CD. Apparently the DVD image doesn't actually fit on a DVD. To be honest I never use the DVD, it only contains a bunch of packages as extra. And those packages are now out of date in any case, so you might as well just download the packages directly from the repositories and skip the ones that came on the DVD.


Good idea.  Except that the disk1.iso image takes 762MB (799.039,488 bytes) and all the CD blanks I have are 702MB.  I burned the minimal.iso and now find that the laptop does not recognize any of my CD-R disks as being bootable.  Not even NetBSD-9.1-i386 CD.


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## astyle (May 13, 2021)

I think you gotta specify the 'make bootable' option BEFORE you push the button to burn the disk... I made that kind of error a few times myself. But if that error fries your machine - it may be just too old to be usable.


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## eternal_noob (May 13, 2021)

JoeInwap said:


> Not even NetBSD-9.1-i386 CD.


If it even does not boot that, burry it. Little guy is tired of life.


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## bakul (May 13, 2021)

On that old a machine it could be your DVD drive.


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## Deleted member 30996 (May 13, 2021)

I just gave my Vista Era Sony Vaio VGN-N320E to a friend in the building in hopes I can teach somebody here to use a computer.

It's pictured here in March running i386 FreeBSD 11.2 RELEASE-p2 and was still running well when I gave it away 2-3 days ago.


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## JoeInwap (May 14, 2021)

eternal_noob said:


> If it even does not boot that, burry it. Little guy is tired of life.


I ended up doing a full install of  KNOPPIX_V6.7.1DVD-2011-09-14-EN.iso from DVD and the laptop is happy.  I'd still like to know if anyone else is having problems with the FreeBSD 11.2 RELEASE DVD image.


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## Deleted member 30996 (May 14, 2021)

JoeInwap said:


> Thanks, but it appears that the DVD image is incomplete.  It gives me the impression that no one has been able to boot from this DVD.  I hope to be proved wrong.


Why do we always end up the goat? It's all your fault, you Devil Worshipers...

Well, there is a screenshot thread where people have shots of their boxen running FreeBSD 11.2. While I installed from a USB stick there would have been something said by several people if there was a problem installing from a DVD. Here's one of mine running 11.2-RELEASE-p4 anyway:







JoeInwap said:


> I'd still like to know if anyone else is having problems with the FreeBSD 11.2 RELEASE DVD image.


No. 11.2 is EOL and no longer supported. We all switched to 12.2 a long time ago. 

I showed you mine running 11.2 as a starting point for you to get yours running and you ran off to Linux Land. Stop back by sometime and we'll have dinner.


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## JoeInwap (May 18, 2021)

I was hoping someone would pipe up and say "I have a 32-bit machine and am able to boot from a DVD burned from 12.2-RELEASE-i386.dvd1 (2020-10-23)".


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## astyle (May 18, 2021)

Trihexagonal said:


> Why do we always end up the goat? It's all your fault, you Devil Worshipers...


GOAT = Greatest Of All Time.


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## JoeInwap (Jun 4, 2021)

Several people have stated that they have FreeBSD-11.2 running on 32-bit hardware,  but no one here has said they have version 12.2 running on 32-bit hardware using a DVD install.  I declare that the DVD1 image is defective and the DISK1 image does not fit on a standard CD blank.  Even when burned to a DVD blank, the DISK1 image fails as the /boot directory is empty.  The BOOTONLY image fails; it not recognized as a bootable CD-R which may mean CD+R is required.

(My BIOS does not have a means for booting from a USB memstick.)


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## tingo (Jun 6, 2021)

If nothing else works, you can always write PLOP to a CD and use that to boot from a usb memstick.


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