Installing FreeBSD-11 on i386

[Ernie Luzar]

James B. Byrne via freebsd-questions wrote:
> On Sat, April 22, 2017 12:46, Heikki Lindholm wrote:
> 
>> Try MBR partitioning first (instead of GPT). Installer DVD should boot
>> when selected from your BIOS boot device selector (F12 during boot or
>> something like that usually).
>>
>>
> 
> When I boot from the i386 DVD I get this:
> 
> Attempting to boot from CD-ROM
> CD Loader 1.2
> 
> Building the boot loader arguments
> Looking up /BOOT/LOADER. . . Found
> Relocating the loader and the BTX
> Starting the BTX loader
> 
> BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.02
> Consoles: internal video/keyboard
> BIOS CD is cd0
> BIOS drive C: is disk0
> BIOS 639kB/208723kB available memory
> 
> |/-\| <=== this part takes a very, very long time.
> 
> FreeBSD/x86 bootstrap loader, Revision 1.1
> (root at releng2.nyi.freebsd.org. Thu Sep 29 03:37:57 UTC 2016)
> Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf
> can't open 'boot/menu-commands.4th': no sucj file or directory
> Error while including /boot/menu.rc, in the line:
> include /boot/menu-commands.4th
> |
> /
> hang/halt/freeze/whatever. . .
> 
> This behavior is not what I started out with on this system.  The
> first time I tried to install I got the usual boot menu and the
> install proceeded up to the point where copying kernel.tzx failed. 
> Now I cannot seem to even get the boot menu to display.
> 
> I have created a usb boot image as well using dd if=pathto.img
> of=/dev/sdb bs=1M oflag=direct and the unit simply goes to the hdd
> even when I select the USB device to boot from.
> 
> I would love to get an MBR based media but that seems unavailable with
> FreeBSD-11.  At least I can discover no way to accomplish this.
> 
> 

Symptoms may be caused by bad dvd media or dvd r/w hardware.
That long pause is a good indicator.
Recreate your dvd disk using a never before used blank one.
You could also trying burning the dvd media on different dvd r/w hardware.

I have 11.0 installed on a i386 mbr hard drive. I used the cdrom1.iso 
because I don't have dvd r/w hardware.