what can i do with a 486?

[Darren Pilgrim]

deeptech71 at gmail.com wrote:
> Jason Hensler wrote:
>> It seems to be that the motherboard probably does not support booting
>> from cd as was common with older systems. A side note, I got the same
>> error on a p4 board yesterday because there was not boot device (bad
>> mbr). I would try a boot floppy to get the system to access the cd-rom
>> or install freebsd on the hard drive from another machine and swap it
>> to the 486.
> 
> I don't have a CD-ROM drive on the 486. That is exactly what I have tried. 
> I've put the HDD in another machine, installed FreeBSD, moved the HDD, then 
> tried to boot. I've even tried 2 "standard" MBRs. Try a boot manager? Nah..

A few stupid questions:

- Are you using dedicated mode?  Most older computers require the use of 
a DOS partition table (slices).

- Are you making sure to set the active partition?

-- 
Darren Pilgrim