Install on a laptop -- no CD or floppy

[Nikolas Britton]

Mark Probert wrote:

>Hi, all.
>
>I have a laptop, a sub-notebook, that I want to install FreeBSD on.  
>Problem is there is no floppy or CD-ROM.  I do have a working Ethernet 
>connection.  Currently, it is running Win98.  The laptop is a ruggedised 
>unit, a Melard Scout2, so it is not easy to get to the HD to install on it 
>separately.
>
>Any suggestions as to the best way to proceed?  
>
>Regards,
>-mark.
>
>
>  
>
I have some Husky FC-486s and they have the ability to be booted via 
PCMCIA ATA Flash card,  If your computer can do this too you might be in 
luck. What you could try is mounting a PCMCIA memory card with another 
computer (running *nix) and flash the memory card with the boot.flp 
floppy: "dd if=boot.flp of=/dev/yourpcmciaataflashcard"  Alternatively 
you could use physdiskwrite or rawrite and do this from your win98 
install on your laptop: http://www.m0n0.ch/wall/installation_generic.php

If that fails then you'll have to remove the harddrive and do the 
install with another computer, here are two technique's for doing this:
Option 1:
1. Get your harddrive out of the laptop.
2. Get a 2.5-3.5 adapter cable and connect it to another computer
3. boot off of it and install freebsd
4. put back into laptop

Option 2:
With this option you don't have to crack the case on your other computer 
or reboot etc:
1. Get your harddrive out of the laptop
2. Get an external USB/Firewire/Etc. harddrive case, put the drive in 
there and connect it to the computer.
3. Start up VMware (or maybe bochs etc.???) and setup a new VM using the 
external drive as the boot device.
4. Install freebsd and put back into laptop etc.

You could try booting from the network like the other person suggested, 
or you might somehow be able to "bootstrap" the freebsd install from 
DOS, you better hope the install works becouse you'll have to blast away 
your Win98 partition.