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Installing FreeBSD on a Windows 95 machine
14 March 1999
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This topic describes how I installed FreeBSD 3.1 onto a Windows 95 machine. The
install was done from a DOS partition. But the destination machine has very little
disk space. So I had to compile a custom kernel on another
machine. Paul Kennett, of The Kennett Bros and Karapoti Classic fame, runs a small LAN at his office. He's been trying to install Linux for some time. I offered to install FreeBSD 3.1 for him. This new box will have a modem and a network [interface] card (NIC). It will dial up to his ISP and allow the rest of the LAN to have access to the Internet. This will be an interesting exercise for me as I've never installed PPP before. The machine will also have a printer accessible from his MS Windows machines. I'll also install some sort of firewall. But for this article, we'll concentrate on getting FreeBSD 3.1 installed. |
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The hardware
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| This machine is a 486 DX 33MHz with 8 Meg of RAM, a CD-ROM, and an Ethernet card.
It has a 400M disk with about 250M free. Windows 95 is already installed on
this machine. My first task will be to install FreeBSD from DOS. I was going
to do this today, but my coax cable and terminators are at Paul's. I also must ask
him if anything on this machine is irreplaceable. I might wind up doing a backup of
his machine. If I can get it connected to my LAN first. I will assume you have
already done this. OK. That's the IP set. The workgroup changed. And the machine rebooted. The machine asked for the Windows CD-ROM but I don't have it here (this *is* someone else's machine remember). So I just skipped all the files. After it rebooted, I could see my other machines. All looks well. |
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Know your interrupt
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| One thing you should do, and I didn't, is find out the hardware settings for your network card. Do this from Windows. Go into the Control Panel and click on Network. Find your network adaptor and see what the IRQ and Address are. You'll need those later. |
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The documentation
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| I started with the Installing
FreeBSD section of The FreeBSD Handbook. I
suggest you go there now and read that before proceeding blindly with my instructions. Before proceeding, I strongly urge you to first read Installing and Using FreeBSD With Other Operating Systems. |
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Creating Boot Floppies
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| This is often a confusing exercise. And I've had to make them more than once. So here's how I did it. |
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Creating a second partition
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| I had only a single partition on the Windows 95 machine. You need two partitions
to create a dual boot machine. One partition will contain Windows 95, the other will
contain FreeBSD. Luckily, FreeBSD comes with a DOS utility called fips.exe
which can be used to create a second partition. You can find this tool in /pub/FreeBSD/tools/tools.
I suggest you create a bootable DOS floppy and put fips.exe on it.
Then reboot your Windows machine using that floppy. Run fips.exe and
repartition your machine. When fips.exe terminated on my machine, it was
unable to reload command.com and displayed a memory error. I just rebooted and
Windows reloaded fine. This partition was about 220M. |
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Getting the FreeBSD files
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| Read Before
installing from a MS-DOS partition before proceeding. It shows you what files
you need to download to your machine. I copied bin and manpages
over into their respective subdirectories under c:\freebsd. But this
didn't work. See the next paragraph. NOTE: I found that using c:\freebsd did not work. I also tried c:\FreeBSD and other upper/lower case combinations. But I was able to get the install to work when I moved the bin directory to c:\bin. I have sent a message to freebsd-docs@freebsd.org and this information has been added to the errata.txt document and is fixed in 3.1-Stable. These files took up about 23 M. |
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The actual install
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| I direct you to the next part of the Handbook: Installing FreeBSD.
Although this has the same title as a section mentioned above, it actually deals with the
process of booting from the floppies. Which is what I'm about to do. I've
placed the kern.flp floppy in the drive and I've restarted the machine. Well, well, well! What do you know! I'm seeing the BTX bootstrap loader as I type. OK. Now it's asked me for the mfsroot.flp floppy. Things are looking good! The rest of this section is divided up into the various screens which are presented by the installation process. Each heading pertains to a particular screen. Please refer to this document as you proceed through the screens. |
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Kernel Configuration
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| OK. Now I have the Kernel Configuration Screen on my screen.
I'm going to choose Start kernel configuration in full screen visual mode.
In this screen you will be asked to remove any conflicts which exist within the system.
Basically, the system is designed to be generic and work with most systems.
What you need to do is remove the things which you don't have. I'm sorry, but I
can't be more specific than that. For me, I have no SCSI devices, so I remove all of
them. I also don't have tape drives etc. Whatever you do, don't remove the
system console or you won't have a screen. If you want this information be saved and used permanently, see Saving and using the kernel change information. Otherwise, you'll have to reenter that visual configuration screen each time you boot. Your other option is to make a custom kernel, which I recommend you do in any case. |
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Novice Install
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| After you save your changes and exit this screen, you will be presented with /stand/sysinstall Main Menu. I selected Novice Install. |
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FDISK Partition Editor
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| On this screen, I choose to delete the wd0s2 partition because it's the one I created
using fips. Well, didn't create it by name, but I checked with fdisk under
DOS and verified that the larger partition was the one I created. It was listed as unknown
whereas the smaller partition was listed as FAT16, which was clearly my Windows
95 partition. After deleting this partition, I created a new partition which became the FreeBSD partition. |
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Boot Manager
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| I choose the FreeBSD Boot Manager. |
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FreeBSD Disklabel Editor
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| I pressed A for Auto. Then Q for save etc. |
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Choose Distributions
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| I choose the Kern-Developer distribution. Later in this section you'll see that this failed and that I tried the minimal installation instead. I don't know why it failed. |
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Choose Installation Media
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| I selected DOS. Then for the DOS Partition, I choose wd0s1 |
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WARNING - file location
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| As mentioned above, I moved c:\freebsd\bin to c:\bin as it just didn't work otherwise. The message displayed said, more or less, that bin could not be installed as it was not included in the distribution. This was a problem with the version I was installing. See errata.txt for current information. |
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Oh oh! The install froze
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| Hmmm, the install has stopped at 69%. I think I've run out of space. I'll
try again with just the Minimal Distribution. That failed at 5%. This time I
tried again, but under Options I turned on debug. That means ALT-F2 gives you the
debugging information and ALT-F1 gives you the main screen. This is going much better now. It's doing a MAKEDEV ALL now! Woo Hoo! |
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Post install configuration
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The install has finished. But then it asks you for configuration things.
Such as Ethernet. Here's what I did:
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The first reboot
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| OK. The reboot failed when it was probing ed0. That's my fault.
I don't think I've configured it properly. So I've rebooted and will enter -c
at the boot prompt. Ouch. The keyboard only responds to ENTER at that point.
That's not good enough! So I rebooted and tried the UP arrow. That got
me into a prompt. Then I chose boot -c. Then I chose visual.
This gets you back to the same point as we were much earlier in the process when
using the floppies. I again removed the conflicts and continued with the boot.
I got a root prompt. All is well. I booted back into Windows and looked under Network in the Control Panel to see what the default settings were for my NE2000 card. They were IRQ 5 and IO 300. OK. If you want that the information you modifed above to be saved and used permanently, see Saving and using the kernel change information. Otherwise, you'll have to reenter that visual configuration screen each time you boot. Your other option is to make a custom kernel, which I recommend you do in any case. |
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Getting the NIC working
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Now that I know the details of the card, I need to get it working. Using the
procedure mentioned in the previous section for getting into the visual configuration.
On this screen I configure ed0 as specified within windows. After
the system boots, I login as root. Then I type the following to configure ed0:ifconfig ed1 inet 10.0.0.10 255.255.255.0 At this point the box is now live and on the LAN. |
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How long did all this take?
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| The above took about 8 hours all up. That includes my writing time and the mistakes. Your time should be less than 2 or 3 hours. |
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What's next?
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| Well, ed0 isn't working properly, so I have to create a new kernel,
but you will recall that I went with the minimal installation. This means that this
machine doesn't include the tools for creating a new kernel. For example, /usr/src
is empty. But I have another machine which is also 3.1-Release. So I will
compile the kernel on that machine and then copy the results to the other machine.
This should run fine. We'll see. Watch this space. Actually, I found out later that you might want to do: Saving and using the kernel change information. |
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Other configuration
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Here's what I added to /etc/rc.conf. These changes gave the box a
name, enabled the gateway (for later use), set up ed0, and specified our
gateway.# This file now contains just the overrides from /etc/defaults/rc.conf # please make all changes to this file. # -- sysinstall generated deltas -- # gateway_enable="YES" debug="YES" # items above were added during install. # items below were added by me. hostname="kennett.freebsddiary.cx" firewall_type="simple" # Firewall type (see /etc/rc.firewall) network_interfaces="ed0 lo0" # List of network interfaces (lo0 is loopback). ifconfig_ed0="inet 192.168.0.45 netmask 255.255.255.0" inetd_flags="-l -R 1024" # Optional flags to inetd. ### Network routing options: ### defaultrouter="192.168.0.20" # Set to default gateway (or NO). In order to use the existing DNS server, I created /etc/resolv.conf which contained the following: search freebsddiary.cx nameserver 192.168.0.20 |
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Compiling the kernel
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| I installed only the minimal stuff which means I don't have the necessary stuff to compile a kernel. So I compiled it on another machine and transferred it over. After this process, the new kernel had ed0 in it with the correct values. WOO HOO! |
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Did this help?
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| This was the first time I've installed FreeBSD on Windows 95. If this doesn't work for you, I'd like to know about it. All comments are appreciated. |