I've never had trouble installing freebsd or any linux/unix system on any computer i've tried to do it on. I just recently aquired a Packard Bell, 75mhz Pentium, 482 i believe. Im having difficulty installing it. I have FreeBSD 5.1 on cd and the computer wont even recognize the cd on boot, so it wont launch the x-install program like it usually does. Is there anyway i can tell this computer to boot from cd?? it is not even an option in the bios settings.

So thinking i could just get a floppy set and install it that way, i made the floppys and succesfully booted in to the x-installer. Well I couldnt get it to even detect the cd in the drive, like my cd-rom wasnt even mounted, and i even tried installing from floppy, and it wouldnt recognize the floppy drive, again like it wasnt mounted. Does anyone have any suggestions?? it would be a great help. Thanks in advance.

It sounds like you are running on some seriously out of date hardware.

You can install FreeBSD via FTP if you have a broadband connection. I wouldn't suggest trying with dial-up. You should be able to install other Linux distribution via FTP as well.

You also might be able to add some boot-up parameters to get support for your CD-Drive. To do this, you will need to crack open your case and get the model number of your CD-Rom drive and controller (if non SCSI/IDE drive) and perform some basic research on the supported hardware for FreeBSD and Linux distributions.

Good Luck!

Have you tried booting from a floppy disk?

I have done it (installing BSD 4.9) from a floppy on old hardware before.

You would need two floppy disks for the task.

The floppies can be obtained from a MsDos terminal, once you have downloaded:

fdimage.exe (program to create the images inside the floppies)
kern.flp (1st disk)
mfsroot.flp (2nd disk)

download from freebsd.org

Bernardo