This is really weird. I'm building a FreeBSD server (used to be Win2k but it kept crashing). The Acer CDRW drive I've got it in apparently doesn't support CD booting or is just broken (verified the CD itself works and the BIOS does attempt to boot to CD).
So I'm trying to do a floppy boot. I KNOW this should work, as I've done it once already with this exact same system. The server sits at my office, before I brought it home to work on it, I started a FreeBSD network install, booting from floppy, just because I had spare time at work and wanted to see what it looked like. That worked fine, and I got all the way to creating the hard drive partitions/slices before I stopped and took it home.
Now, I've got almost the same system. The only difference is that I changed the hard drive to a larger one (and it is a known good drive, and the problem doesn't even involve the hard drive).
So, I create a new set of boot floppies using the images on the freebsd.org server. Boot, it seems to work fine, and it gets all the way to the boot prompt (press enter to boot or any other key for a command prompt) and it automatically started booting the kernel. After a few seconds of the cursor spinning thing, text starts streaming down the screen, sort of like the Matrix. It appears to be hex code, but it's going too fast to make out exactly what it says. Each line goes about 2/3 across the screen, in 4 columns, and it appears to be 2 or 3 lines that repeat.
So I figured maybe one of the floppies was corrupted, since I couldn't think of anything else to cause this. I reformatted them, reimaged them, and the same thing happened. So I tried two other floppies, and they do the same thing.
By the time anybody reads this or feels like responding, I'll probably have resolved it by swapping in a CD drive that can CD boot, but it'd be nice to figure out what the problem is.
So I'm trying to do a floppy boot. I KNOW this should work, as I've done it once already with this exact same system. The server sits at my office, before I brought it home to work on it, I started a FreeBSD network install, booting from floppy, just because I had spare time at work and wanted to see what it looked like. That worked fine, and I got all the way to creating the hard drive partitions/slices before I stopped and took it home.
Now, I've got almost the same system. The only difference is that I changed the hard drive to a larger one (and it is a known good drive, and the problem doesn't even involve the hard drive).
So, I create a new set of boot floppies using the images on the freebsd.org server. Boot, it seems to work fine, and it gets all the way to the boot prompt (press enter to boot or any other key for a command prompt) and it automatically started booting the kernel. After a few seconds of the cursor spinning thing, text starts streaming down the screen, sort of like the Matrix. It appears to be hex code, but it's going too fast to make out exactly what it says. Each line goes about 2/3 across the screen, in 4 columns, and it appears to be 2 or 3 lines that repeat.
So I figured maybe one of the floppies was corrupted, since I couldn't think of anything else to cause this. I reformatted them, reimaged them, and the same thing happened. So I tried two other floppies, and they do the same thing.
By the time anybody reads this or feels like responding, I'll probably have resolved it by swapping in a CD drive that can CD boot, but it'd be nice to figure out what the problem is.
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