Okay, so here I find myself on the long road to making some custom boot
floppies. I have read the man pages and searched the Google and come up with
a partial list of things to do in order to make a boot floppy. I am doing
this as an excercise so that I can have a better understanding of the NetBSD
OS. Guess what? It's working.

Step 1 : Insert a blank floppy into the drive.
Step 2 : disklabel -w -r /dev/fd0a floppy
Step 3 : newfs /dev/fd0a
Step 4 : installboot /usr/mdec/biosboot.sym /dev/fd0a
Step 5 : mount -t ffs /dev/fd0a /mnt/floppy
Step 6 : cp /mnt/dvd/i386/binary/kernel/netbsd-GENERIC_TINY.gz /mnt/floppy

At this point I can get the system to boot into the kernel. The problem is
that it reboots during startup. I think the last thing it is trying to do is
mount the root filesystem (hard to see because it reboots rather quickly).

My question is what else do I need to do to get to the prompt? Single user
mode is acceptable. I understand that singel user mode requires a lot less
of the OS - important when cramming onto a single floppy. I figure I need to
do something to the kernel to make it aware of the root filesystem and add
some critical files that the init process needs. I'm still reading, but
could use a little direction.




-----Original Message-----
From: Rose, Brian 
Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2002 12:34 PM
To: Netbsd-Users (E-mail)
Subject: Making Boot floppies



I am trying to make a boot floppy per the instructions in the NetBSD Guide
(chapter 20). However, there are several problems.

1. When trying to make the .fs files, the make fails saying that it cannot
find several files ( /distrib/common/Makefile.distrib and
/common/Makefile.tarfloppy ).

2. When I grab the .fs files off of the CD, I still cannot proceed because I
do not have a /usr/src/distrib/i386/floppies/fdset folder.

Is this the proper way to make boot floppies? Is there another way? Where do
I get a current set of makefiles for making floppies?

Brian Rose 
Brian dot Rose at icn dot siemens dot com 
407-942-6934 
If you hold a Unix shell to your ear, do you hear the C?