Re: Making boot floppies for 7043-140

Thanks for the response.

The system (as well as a 43p Model 150 CHRP system) were rescues that I 
was re-prepping before passing them on. I ended up installing AIX 4.3.3 
on them and they are now in a holding area, awaiting new owners.

I got a lot of suggestions to use net install, but that is hard to 
configure in my lab. I collect 32-bit SPARC systems and was hoping to 
run Solaris 2.5.1 PPC on the -140 but it has an incompatible processor. 
NetBSD was my preferred alternative.

I went back to the earliest NetBSD that I could find with prep support 
and the .fs file in the installation/floppies directory were all (or 
almost all) too large.

alan

On 2/21/19 12:47 PM, T wrote:
> I'm not completely sure about this, but my speculation is:
> -The last time someone worked on the makefiles for the boot floppies, 
> the kernel was much smaller and over the years has grown in size 
> through changes to the default options and codebase.
> -PReP is not a popular port, so not much attention is given to it. 
> This allows for things like this to slip under the radar and usually 
> need to be fixed by folks that use the port.
> -Not many users of this port probably use floppy boot, most probably 
> use the network boot method instead or boot from an install CD.
> -CD booting should work, but the last time I checked and if I remember 
> correctly, it defaults to rs232 console output and appeared to be 
> broken (on my hardware).
>
> To get around that issue, you'll need to create a custom CD ISO image 
> that doesn't use the COM boot loader, but the regular one instead.
> https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-inst-media.html
> You would need to modify this file in in the source:
> https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-8/src/distrib/prep/cdroms/installcd/Makefile 
>
> On line 4, change "sysinst_com0.fs" to "sysinst.fs", this will allow 
> you to do a regular non-rs232 install.
>
> The i386 port looks to have working boot floppies, but they use a 
> special boot loader that allows the image to be spread across a series 
> of floppies.
> https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-8/src/distrib/i386/floppies/common/Makefile.bootfloppy 
>
> I don't see that boot loader available for PReP, so it would probably 
> need to be ported (if possible) to make floppy boot work once again.
>
> If you get the installation to work, but the machine does not boot 
> past a blinking cursor on a black screen, this thread may be of 
> interest to you:
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-prep/2018/02/05/msg000129.html
> The default boot image the installer writes to the PReP partition does 
> not seem to work, but you can get it to work by using the 
> sysinst_small image instead.
> The regular sysinst image may work too, but I don't remember if I 
> tried that one.
>
> On 2/17/19 5:11 PM, Alan Perry wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I need to clobber the HDD on a RS/6000 7043-140 and I am doing it by 
>> installing NetBSD over what's there.
>>
>> How does one create a boot floppy under NetBSD/sparc? The NetBSD/prep 
>> floppy .fs files are all larger than a 1.44M floppy and the RS/6000 
>> throws an exception when I boot it from a floppy that is a simple dd 
>> of the .fs images. What should I be doing to create a floppy that works?
>>
>> alan
>>
>