[plug] netBSD installation [OT]

[Mark O'Shea]

Hi Lyndon,

On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 22:47 +0800, Lyndon Maydwell wrote:
> At the risk of being off topic, I've decided to ask here, as I don't
> know of any BUGs (hehe) in perth, the netBSD forums are still very
> new, and #netbsd on freenode is idle-city.

You might like to check out the netbsd mailing lists.  There are
archives at marc.theaimsgroup.com (along with many other interesting
list archives).

> I've aquired an old pentium computer and want to give netBSD a try,
> 2.0 just recently came out so I made followed the instructions and
> made the series of two boot floppies (this PC won't boot from CD) but
> it always fails on the second floppy. I've tried a few diferent disks,
> and the md5sum always checks out, so I'm at a loss.
> 
As Russell has said, if you have any error messages then they would
probably help us to help you.  If not then at least telling us what is
on the screen when it fails will help.

It is possible (although you haven't given us any information to tell us
so) that it just hung while loading the image from the second disk
before the kernel starts pumping out the dmesg.  This could indicate
that it has run out of space to store the image.  How much ram do you
have in the machine?  Do you know that it is all good (memtest86 will
help with this)?  If you don't have much ram have you considered trying
some of the other boot floppies provided by the netbsd team for lower
spec computers?