Minimal system installation

[Colin J. Raven]

On Dec 28, Ted Mittelstaedt launched this into the bitstream:

>
> Your just not going to be able to do this one as it is,
> you need to boot into FreeBSD in order to write a FreeBSD
> boot selector or boot loader on the hard disk.
>
> Borrow another laptop and temporairly move the hard drive from
> the first laptop to the second, then load FreeBSD onto it
> and move the disk back.
>
> Have you tried looking for a floppy for this laptop on
> Ebay?
>
> In theory if you had a copy of Norton Ghost you could ghost
> an image of the laptop hard disk running FreeBSD (obviously
> you would need another identical working laptop) then
> on your laptop you could dialup with a modem and download
> a packet driver and try running it under win98 DOS using a
> 3com 3c89 pcmcia card (which is one of the few pcmcia cards
> that will run a packet driver without card services) then
> running the ghost client, than pulling the image over the
> network.
>
> Incidentally you probably can't get the pcmcia slot to work
> because with a laptop that old, it's a 16 bit pcmcia card
> slot, and all the pcmcia cards sold today are 32 bit cardbus
> ones.  That 3c589 3com pcmcia card is your friend.  It's not
> in production anymore but there's tons on Ebay.
>
> Ted
>
>> How about this one...a laptop with the CD inoperable and the floppy
>> missing. The PCMCIA controller may/may_not be fried because no known
>> PCMCIA network card will work, but owing to the vagaries of Win98 who
>> knows for sure. All we know presently is that the serial port works.
>> Disk is OK and it has 40MB of memory. Add to that the fact that for
>> ridiculously sentimental reasons I am reluctant to part with the darn
>> thing, so as a last ditch effort I'd sure like to put *some* BSD on it.
>> The question is....how?

Ted,
Thanks for an enormously helpful response, greatly appreciated.
I think I'll leave the laptop on it's shelf for another few weeks/months 
and go hunt up a 3C589 PCMCIA card, then try yanking the H/D and 
proceeding as you outlined above.
Somewhat tangentially I have a suspicion that the PCMCIA controller may
well be cooked because if memory serves, I had one of those cards back 
when which worked and then abruptly failed. Wondering if the card itself 
had fried I popped it into a recent laptop and it immediately passed 
packets...at least that's my recollection. Nonetheless despite that 
gloomy outlook I'll still give this a shot with another card of the 
heritage you described.
Thanks for taking the time to explain the why's/how's on this, I have a 
clearer view of the upcoming task now.

Warm Regards & Thanks,
-Colin