For a normal CDROM or network installation, all you need to copy onto
an actual floppy from this directory is the boot.flp image (for 1.44MB
floppies).

IMPORTANT NOTE: These images are NOT DOS files!  You cannot simply
copy them to a DOS floppy as regular files, you need to *image* copy
them to the floppy with fdimage.exe under DOS or `dd' under UNIX.  You
also must be sure to transfer them in BINARY mode when using FTP since
ASCII mode will destroy the contents, as will certain web browsers.
If the length of the floppy image is not exactly 1474560 bytes in your
copy then it has been corrupted in transit and must be re-fetched.


CREATING A FLOPPY FROM AN IMAGE FILE:
-------------------------------------

To create the boot floppy image from DOS, you'd do something like
this:

C> fdimage boot.flp a:

Assuming that you'd copied fdimage.exe and boot.flp into a directory
somewhere.  If you were doing this from the base of a CD distribution,
then the *exact* command would be:

E> tools\fdimage floppies\boot.flp a:


If you're creating the boot floppy from a UNIX machine, you may find
that:

        dd if=floppies/boot.flp of=/dev/rfd0

or

        dd if=floppies/boot.flp of=/dev/floppy

work well, depending on your hardware and operating system environment
(different versions of UNIX have totally different names for the
floppy drive - neat, huh? :-).

SPECIAL NOTE: If you're using a DPT SCSI RAID controller you must
use the special boot-dpt.flp image, otherwise just use the standard
boot.flp image.  This is just temporary until the DPT driver has had
more testing, upon which time it will be merged into the standard boot
image.  Furthermore, it should ** also be noted ** that the GENERIC
kernel which is unpacked by the bin distribution will NOT have DPT
support in it and simply exiting the installation the first time
will leave you with a system which cannot boot from any hard disk
attached to the DPT controller.  To prevent this, what you do instead
is complete the install as normal (also making sure to select the
kernel sources at the very minimum for sources in the Distributions
menu!) but ** do not exit the installer yet **.  Instead, after you've
finished the very last of the installation, switch over to the 4th VTY
(ALT-F4) and go to the /sys/i386/conf directory.  Copy GENERIC to a
new config file name (e.g. MYKERNEL) and then edit it to enable the DPT
entries which are commented out in it.  Config, build and install a
new kernel from this new kernel config file and, assuming that all goes
well with the kernel's installation into /, go back to the first VTY
(ALT-F1) and exit the installation as normal.  You should now come up
off the hard disk with your DPT-enabled kernel with no problems.

If you've already completed an installation without first reading these
notes and are now wondering what to do, don't worry - simply
boot the original installation floppy but this time but also prepare
a fixit.flp image floppy as you did the installation floppy and
use Fixit mode to fsck/mount your old filesystems.  Once you have
your / and /usr filesystems mounted (assuming they were separate),
you can chroot to your mount point for / and do the same GENERIC
fiddling as described in the paragraph above to get things fixed.

There is also the kernel from a boot floppy here which can be
used with the `fbsdboot.exe' program from the ../tools directory
to boot straight into the FreeBSD installation from DOS (and not
a Windows DOS box, but *DOS*! ;)