Subject: Re: next68k port status?
To: Michael Wolfson <michael@nosflow.com>
From: Brian Willoughby <brianw@sounds.wa.com>
List: port-next68k
Date: 10/20/2003 15:09:11
[ > Recently I noticed the SPARC boot/disklabel support in cdrecord, and I
[ > wondered whether the next68k disklabel could also exist on an ISO CD.
[ > But it seems the NeXT label starts at the beginning of the disk
[ > (LABELSECTOR == LABELOFFSET == 0), so it probably won't fit on an ISO
[ > CD.
Could an answer be found by examining the NeXT install CDs at the block level?
I believe that those are Rockridge - isn't that ISO compatible?
[ Well, now that I think about it, if NeXT required use of a floppy to run
[ NeXTSTEP from a CD-ROM, then it seems unlikely we'll easily figure it out
[ either.
I may not remember this precisely, but the floppy was only needed on older
systems because the firmware would not boot from the 2048 byte block devices
-or- perhaps it was because a CD-ROM is identified as a different type of SCSI
device, and would normally be ignored as a boot device (just like you cannot
boot from a SCSI scanner). I believe that the newer NeXT's, especially the
later Turbo machines, would boot from CD-ROM without the floppy.
Brian