Burn Free BSD 5.4 (i386) ISO images with Nero 6


Step-1:
This is a short tutorial for burning Free BSD 5.4 (i386) ISO images with Nero 6. Here I will show you how to burn Free BSD 5.4 ISO images (it can be applied to any FreeBSD i386 family distributions or may be with other *BSD distributions) with the popular CD/DVD burning software Nero 6 on Windows platform. Burning Free BSD 5.4 (i386) ISO images with Nero 6 is very much identical to burning Fedora Core 4 (x86) ISO images with Nero 6.

First you have to download all Free BSD 5.4 ISO images from FreeBSD's FTP site. You can also download from other FTP sites listed on this page. There are only 3 ISO images there. The ISO images are labeled something like 5.4-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso, 5.4-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso and 5.4-RELEASE-i386-disc2.iso. You do not need to download the first ISO image, which is labeled as 5.4-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso. Download the other two ISO images. After downloading those two ISO images for Free BSD 5.4, try opening them using WinRAR. If they are opening without showing any error, they are not corrupted. It is safe now to burn CDs with those ISO images. If any of the images show an error while you try opening it, you must re-download that specific ISO image.

The actual method to check that the ISO images are not corrupted is
checking each ISO image with the MD5 (Message Digest) program. Since
not many Windows users are familiar with this tool, I skipped it
intentionally. See a screenshot below:

MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso) = 2afe65af7e7b994c3ce87cefda27352e 
MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso) = 3dbb37485535e129354bc099e24aed99 
MD5 (5.4-RELEASE-i386-disc2.iso) = e4b748415ca783fce64cfafd6bd56f57 

Step-2:
Open Nero 6, the wizard will appear. Click on the Cancel button. Now from the Recorder menu, click on the Burn Image... sub menu. Picture given below:




Open the directory where you downloaded Free BSD 5.4 ISO images. Now select the first ISO image (5.4-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso) and click on the Open button. Picture given below:




After opening the ISO image, you will see the dialog below:




Select Disc-at-once/96 for Write method. I selected 8x (1,200 KB/s) for Write speed. You can select a higher value though. Now click on the Burn button. Follow the same instruction for burning the next ISO image on CD. After all the ISO images successfully burned with Nero 6, have a look at their contents with Windows Explorer. Picture given below:




That's it. Run your Free BSD 5.4 installer with the first bootable disc, which is 5.4-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso. You should get a similar output given below:




You do not have to worry about creating a boot disc. It will boot automatically. You have to select CD Rom Drive as the First Boot Device from your BIOS setup though.


Other Helpful Resources:
http://www.freebsd.org
http://www.bsdforums.org