Installing FreeBSD on a P133
While doing the PCBSD installation in the background, I also decided to finally make use of an old Dell Dimension P133v that I got from a family friend. It has 16MBs of RAM and a 2G hard drive. Anyhoo, stupid me decided to burn and waste a CD on FreeBSD 5.4. I'll elaborate on why in a bit. Anyway I burned it on one of those generic CDs which have no labels on them (well there was one on the inner rim on mine). After fiddling around with trying to get the CD to install I decided to create the boot floppies. Man it was hard looking for those in the drawers. I am glad I still kept a few. But no dice. At the same time, I was thinking that maybe the CD is not bootable or I didn't burn it correctly so I went to my trusty VM ware and popped open my CD tray. Then I opened the Dell CD tray and found out I that had the CD inserted upside down. Doh! Well tried to boot from the CD and got a "Could not find primary volume descriptor" message. After googling, I found that I might need to upgrade my BIOS. Fortunately for me, Dell still had the BIOS update files for this very old machine. Now I do not get that message, but when it boots up from the CD it just reboots. I noticed the same thing with the boot floppies. It was at that point I thought to myself, maybe because it is FreeBSD 5.x that's the reason its not working. It might not be too compatible with older hardware. So I made a new set of floppy images for FreeBSD 4.11. And I performed a network install, similar to the way I did for the 486, with 12MBs of RAM and a 400MB Hard drive that I use to run my mail server. And things are honky dory now. Had a few glitches with the first install because I didn't select a proper mirror but after the retry it works fine. Question now is what do I do with that machine. That I still have to think about, but I'll think of something.

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