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Old 16th March 2021
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lubert lubert is offline
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Default 6.8 install on Thinkpad 701c

Hi, I'm trying to figure out how to install 6.8 on my Thinkpad 701c which has a 75mhz 486 and 32mb of ram. For peripherals, I've got a floppy drive, pcmcia ethernet card, and a pcmcia to sd adapter.

The trouble I'm running into is that none of the pcmcia devices are detected using the 6.8 boot floppy, so I can't do a network install or a local install with the packages copied to the pcmcia sd card. I also tried using an older floppyC57.fs image which has pcmcia support but also didn't have any luck getting the pcmcia devices detected.

Any recommendations on what I should try next? Thank you all!
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Old 16th March 2021
J65nko J65nko is offline
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A long time ago I installed Windows 95 on a MS-DOS notebook without CD drive. I transferred (via serial cable) the Windows 95 *CAB files to a small primary partition on the hard disk. Then started the install from that partition.

IIRC DR DOS at that time had a serial communcation program like Laplink (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplink) or I used another serial communication program. Cannot remember exactly

I think OpenBSD still supports installing from a primary DOS partion.
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Old 16th March 2021
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Quote:
Originally Posted by J65nko View Post
I think OpenBSD still supports installing from a primary DOS partion.
Yes, the i386 RAMDISK kernel still supports FAT filesystem mounts. If the netbook's hard drive can be written to with another OS, or moved and written to from another computer, then this is a possible solution.
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Old 17th March 2021
ibara ibara is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lubert View Post
75mhz 486 and 32mb of ram.
The OpenBSD/i386 toolchain defaults to -march=i586 as of 2020-09-30. I forget if 6.8 was built with -march=i586 or not. But going forward, it definitely will not work on your machine, save for you compiling everything yourself with that change reverted.
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Old 17th March 2021
J65nko J65nko is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ibara View Post
The OpenBSD/i386 toolchain defaults to -march=i586 as of 2020-09-30. I forget if 6.8 was built with -march=i586 or not.
From https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/...6/INSTALL.i386
Quote:
OpenBSD/i386 runs on standard PC computers and clones, based on Intel
and compatible 80486 or better processors.
But https://www.openbsd.org/i386.html says:
Quote:
Supported hardware:
Processors

All CPUs compatible with the Intel Pentium or later, with Intel-compatible hardware floating point support should work.
So it seems that 6.8 is the last version that supports i486
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Last edited by J65nko; 17th March 2021 at 12:57 AM.
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Old 28th March 2021
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Thank you all for the suggestions, over the weekend I tried installing 6.8 using the file sets copied over to a FAT partition from another computer.

What I tried was:
- Format 4GB sd card using MBR as the scheme and partition into a 3GB FAT32 partition and a 1GB FAT16 partition
- Download the 6.8 ISO and copy over the "6.8" directory to the 1GB partition
- Boot from floppy
- During install, select the 3GB partition for OpenBSD and use auto config
- Interestingly, the installer finds the file sets on the partition, but complains about "INSTALL.i386" not found, I continued anyways, and double-checked afterwards that the file was there
- Install everything except the "x*" file sets

After a few hours, the installer seemed to work and prompted to restart! However after restart, the machine hanged on boot with a blinking cursor and no other debug information. Typically when I don't have any bootable devices, I will see a prompt asking me to insert a floppy, and I didn't see that here, so I'm thinking that it at least tried to boot OpenBSD but failed to do so. I might try an older version later today.

Last edited by lubert; 28th March 2021 at 04:45 PM.
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