Re: bootxx needs to fit within 0th track of MBR partition?

Jason Thorpe <[email protected]> Fri, 25 Aug 2023 05:51:38 -0400

Newsgroups	gmane.os.netbsd.ports.x86-64,gmane.os.netbsd.ports.i386
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

> On Aug 25, 2023, at 5:43 AM, Martin Husemann <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> We may consider dropping them all. Pretty sure there are not many floppy
> drives and floppies in working condition around (or in use). I have
> a machine with a 3.5 inch drive (486) but the floppy drive is either
> broken or all media I tried are bad. I'm currently booting it from a
> SCSI ZIP drive.

Please don’t drop floppies altogether.  I *recently* put together a Pentium system specifically to dual-boot MSDOS and NetBSD for the express purpose of manipulating FM and MFM-encoded floppies for ancient systems.  I’m perfectly fine dropping the 1.2M floppies, I guess (said system’s 5.25” drive is double-density).  Happy to install from 1.44M disks, don’t want to install from optical.

-- thorpej