Installation Help: Boot from live CD hangs on Dell Inspiron 8000

[belail620]

Hello. Im trying to install Freenas 8 on an old Dell Inspiron 8000 that I have. The laptop has a Pentium 3 800mhz(i think) processor, 256mB of Ram, 40gb ide HD, floppy and CD drives. Im very new to freenas, and have never installed a freeBSD system before, however once upon a time I installed and used an Ubuntu system for a while. So I know next to nothing about linux. Now on to the problem.

Everytime I try to boot from the CD, it hangs after the message: "uhub0: 2 ports with 2 removable, self powered". If I turn on verbose mode, I get the additional messages: "fdc0: output ready timeout". This message repeats a total of 7 times, 4 after the uhub0 message. This leads me to believe that it is hanging while trying to probe the floppy disk drive. I can not get it past this point no matter what I try.

Ive updated the bios, disabled pretty much everything including the floppy disk drive, and everything except power cord is unplugged. Ive also tried each boot option, and it always hangs at the same spot. I have not been able to find much of anything by searching, except I saw that after updating to 8.0.1, some people reported that their floppy drives were no longer working. I tried to boot the cd in a virtual machine with Parallels, configured very closely to my laptop, on my iMac and it worked perfectly, so I do not think that it is the cd.

I think this might be a FreeBSD problem, not particularly FreeNAS. I might try to install the beta4 next and see what happens.

Any help at all will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[joeschmuck]

Let me stop you there... 256MB of RAM? You really need 4GB of RAM to run FreeNAS 8.

 

[belail620]

I thought that one of the apealling aspects of Freenas was that you could turn an old computer into a nas and that it only required 192mb of ram. I know that the zfs filesystem requires more but that the ufs filesystem doesn't. Is this only the case for freenas 7? I first heard about freenas on lifehacker.com where they used freenas 7 on an old computer

http://m.lifehacker.com/5822590/turn-an-old-computer-into-a-networked-backup-streaming-or-torrenting-machine-with-freenas

 

[joeschmuck]

FreeNAS .7 is less demanding but still a great product. Click on the link at the top of the page to enter the FreeNAS 7 Forums and hope you get it working.

 

[belail620]

I'll try 7 and see what happens. Thanks for your help.

Also, just to be clear, I don't believe the problem I was having was due to my computer's specs. I didn't even get to the install prompt. I believe its more of a bug in freenas. I was able to boot fine in a virtual machine configured with 128mB of ram.

 

[belail620]

Just tried 7 and it hangs on boot as well. It hangs at a different spot, but still hangs. The last line is "md0: Preloaded image </mfsroot> 201326592 bytes at 0x80f14368" Tried disabling ACPI, and boot with safe mode and no change. Hangs at the same spot. Turning verbose on, I see the same fdc0 messages, then a couple of acpi lines, then lastly a couple of battery lines, the last of which "battery1: battery initialization done, tried 1 times".

Any ideas?

 

[gcooper]

Running FreeBSD with 256MB of RAM is doable, but it's still not recommended. The best the box can do is route simple packets as a router, and even then I wouldn't route more than gigabit line speed.