Ok, let me start by saying that ive never had this much trouble in my entire life, and i could kill some one right about now... (has gun by side).

I have freebsd installed... what a fucking os, its badass, for the most part. I had slackware 8.0 setup, also badass. Now, i try to setup slackware 9.0 (the upgrade). I said fuck it, i need to start clean slate anyway, so i pop in my custom made windows bootdisk and delete all non-dos partitions (therefore getting rid of slackware.) Time to install slackware 9.0 (im excited). I put the cd into the computer, nothing happens. WTF. Ok, no biggie, prob bad cd. I test it on my windows computer, it works.... hmmm... must be cdrom drive? pulls cords out of cd rom drive and riggs a second one inside case.... still freezes (this cd rom works, its the one from my windows pc). Ok, wtf. Must be some kind of slackware boot /mobo conflict. Who cares, ill get the slackware boot disks (BIG MISTAKE). I download a few bootdisks, stick them in the machine, and a nice screen with instructions appears extra fast (thinks to self: wow... might start using this instead of custom windows boot disk). I'm good at following instructions, so i do as they say and download the root disk... it doesnt work, i download diff version, it doesnt work. i download them all... they dont work.... Well i noticed that freebsd takes diff times with diff. disks of the same root image. Im guessing that it stops the image as soon as it hits a bad sector on disk? Anyways, i fdformated'd about 60 diff. floppies b4 i found one with no errors what so ever, and i coped the image to the disk using "dd if=text.gz of=/dev/fd0" beacuse it seems to me that text.gz works when color.gz doesnt, so it must be a lil more stabel. Anyways, i pop the disk in to the computer when it asks for it, and kablam, error all the way, it gives me this "crc error<5> VFS". Anyways, after breaking my desk (i slammed my hand down on it, and it went thru...) and fixing it again (i used screws to reenforce it so next time it wont break...), i still have no answer. I'll be online till i fix the damn thing and get it running, so if you feel you can help, my aim s/n = wwwc21 and my email is divine@fzondlo.com (which i have on LOUD alert). anyways, thx for reading this, and thx in advance for my solution....

I'll ask the obvious! Why don't you make FreeBSD from the IOS images? I recently installed SuSE linux via ftp, the first set of boot disks failed, I went and bought new floppies, they failed also, I then used a program called raw-write which is a dos program to create the boot disks, after that everything went fine. The raw write program is in a directory called " dosutils " on most linux distros, not sure if its available for FreeBSD though.

ftp://ftp.se.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD...-RELEASE/tools

I found raw write for FreeBSD 5.1, it makes the boot floppies cleaner than dd ( I think that the file gets corrupted when downloading, the dd command works fine from local file source ). If you want I'll test it for you, and post the instructions on line.