On Tue, 15 Aug 2000, Henry Nelson wrote:

> I'm moving this over to help from sparc.  The original request was how to
> make install boot floppies on a Sun IPC 4/40 running NetBSD/sparc1.4.2.
> (Previously I made them on the same model of IPC 4/40 running SunOS4.1.3.)
> 
> > 	IIRC, I used:
> > 
> > 	# fdformat
> 
> All I get is:
> # fdformat
> Ready to format /dev/rfd0a with 80 cylinders, 2 tracks, 18 sectors of 512 bytes
> (1440 KB) Yes/no [y]?y
> EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEF
> fdformat: 160 track formatting errors
> 
	That is something of a bad sign - have you tried different floppy
	disks and different machines (if possible).

> > 	# dd if=boot-142.fs of=/dev/rfd0a bs=18k
> 
> What I've been using on the SunOS machine, namely, "dd if=boot-142.fs
> of=/dev/rfd0c bs=512 conv=sync", does make a viable install floppy.  The
> bs=18k surprises me (but no way to test until I get fdformat to work).

	The 18k just sends the data in track sized chunks, which speeds
	things up a little.

                David/absolute
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