Before the disaster

Before the disaster

There isn’t much to this section.  It’s just a ploy to get you to read the Emergency Restore Procedure of the FreeBSD Handbook.

If you don’t have time to do it now, you certainly won’t have time to do it after the disaster.

Creating a bootable floppy

Here’s how I created a bootable floppy.  First I formatted the disk, then I created a new file system.

[root@ns:/usr/home] # fdformat /dev/rfd0
[root@ns:/usr/home] # disklabel -w -r /dev/rfd0 fd1440
[root@ns:/usr/home] # newfs /dev/rfd0
Warning: Block size and bytes per inode restrict cylinders per 
                                                        group to 5.
Warning: 1216 sector(s) in last cylinder unallocated
/dev/rfd0:      2880 sectors in 1 cylinders of 1 tracks, 4096 sectors
        1.4MB in 1 cyl groups (5 c/g, 10.00MB/g, 4448 i/g)
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
 32,
[root@ns:/cdrom/floppies] # mount /cdrom
[root@ns:/cdrom/floppies] # cd /cdrom/floppies
[root@ns:/cdrom/floppies] # dd if=boot.flp of=/dev/rfd0

insert a new floppy

[root@ns:/cdrom/floppies] # dd if=fixit.flp of=/dev/rfd0
[root@ns:/cdrom/floppies] # umount /cdrom

I urge you to do the above so that you have a bootable floppy in case you need it later.

The above procedures worked as I thought they would.  I tested rebooting with the boot floppy.  That worked.  When the configuration options appeared, chose the the visual interface.  Then I removed the interrupt conflicts, then exited.   Then I selected the fixit floppy.  That’s when things went bad.  The box was unable to read the floppy.  However, I was able to use the other two options under FixIt: the holographic shell and the 2nd CD of the 4 CDs. 

If anyone has suggestions not covered by the above information and links, please contribute your comments.