Hi,

1999/06/29 8:46:27, "Henry B. Hotz"  wrote:

> At 2:26 PM -0700 6/28/99, Bill Studenmund wrote:

> >I think the boot floppies are real easy to use if you already have a
> >NetBSD box. I'm working on getting something easier for new users.

> If you already have a NetBSD box why wouldn't you use either netboot
> from a server or direct boot from hard disk instead of floppy?

In generally, yes.  My Power Mac clone has MESH SCSI controler which was
not supported when I started to use NetBSD on it and it lacks on-board
Ethernet to netboot from other machine.  It's special case:-)

> The way I see it the primary customer for the boot floppy is the new
> user installing NetBSD from scratch.  Given the problems with creating
> a bootable coff binary I'd say the DiskCopy image is the prefered way
> for us to go in the short term.

Before I diceded to use suntar to handle boot floppy image, I tried to use
DiskCopy first and failed to write the raw floppy image into floppy just
formatted since DiskCopy needs some header information with the image file.

Once you have a boot floppy itself, you can make its image file using
DiskCopy.

> Does that two-stage boot process you described explain why I got two
> boot chimes from my machine before I got a command line prompt?  Or was
> that some kind of failure followed by a retry which worked?  (PowerMac
> 8500, boot floppy image from the last month or two.)

Well, type 'printenv' in OF prompt and check if 'real-mode' is false.