FreeBSD 5.3 did not detect my CD-ROM and hard drive when I had them configured as master/slave. There was a third option, CS, if I remember correctly. After I set both of them to that, it detected them both.

The Installer appears to be a bit buggy. I need to report it. I kept getting kernel panics with page errors during net installation. Guess if that is irritating. Now I will burn CDs and use the installer with them.

William

CS would be cable select. I will confess I have not read this thread entirely, so if this is a redundant question, I apologize. But did you recently add some hardware prior to the install? If switching to CS cured your problem, that would suggest to me that your hardware would not be correctly detected by your BIOS either. I have had similar problems in the past when I have not had the correct jumper pin setting on the drive in question. Just food for thought.

Another idea, if you feel the 5.3 installer is buggy is to install 4.11 or 4.10 and if your interested in running 5.3 you can just cvsup the OS to the newest version. Are you dual booting by chance? I'm wondering if your RAM is flaking out on you (in regards to the page errors and kernel panics).

I recently took out the old hd and chucked it. It had Win98 and was definitely getting worn out. It only had 2 GB.

I don't know what the deal is. It doesn't boot, except from 650 Mb CDs, even if the CD drive is a modern CD RW / DVD combo. It booted from an old Lindows Cd I have, and an old Red Hat CD. Lindows installed, but KDE didn't have a menu bar or anything. Red Hat installed if I used the text installer, but some old LILO was lurking in the MBR and I couldn't get it out whatever I tried, (like writing nulls to the first 512 bytes of the hd) so I couldn't get Red Hat to boot right. FreeBSD took care of MBR. Maybe I do have to get an older FreeBSD. The computer isn't very exotic. Pentium MMX, 200MHz, 128 Mb RAM, 40 GB hd. The RAM checks out in the BIOS check. I might try Debian, but it might need a little more the 128 MB of RAM.

The BIOS check is good for exactly buttkiss. Download memtest86 and let it bang on it for a while.

Don't worry about it. Up until this page this thread is from 2003 ...

Wow. Didn't even notice. Interesting.