If your (old) machine doesn’t have a CD ROM drive or does not boot from USB, PXE boot to re-install a new operating system is the best option if you do not want to buy any more hardware to solve the situation. In the past, setting up a PXE server was a hassle. The internet is littered with linux configurations on tftp server. But if all you want to do is to boot your machine and autoload the ISO, here’s the fastest way with minimal fuss.
Steps # Default install using Ventoy USB with FreeBSD install ISO update pkg by running to install any package ex. pkg install vim pkg install bash Install video drivers for ati - ref AMD section in https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/x11/. This should take the screen to VGE mode with max resolution Make default shell bash: chsh and edit (vim editor runs) the tcsh out with bash install kde5, xorg, xfce, firefox-esr, mc, elinks, htop, libreoffice allow root to login as ssh: edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set PermitRootLogin to yes; restart sshd Tips # Make root writable in single user mode (if you cannot login as root because you messed up the shell or have some corruption:
If you are PXE booting a client machine with an ISO file that is bigger than available memory on your client, the PXE boot will probably fail. This is because PXE boot is copying the ISO into memory. Nowadays, most of the OS install ISOs are more than 512MB, even for FreeBSD. So here’s the process to install FreeBSD on your very old hardware with 512MB memory or less.