Re: Trying to boot NetBSD on '97 Pentium I @ 200 MHz

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Tue, May 12, 2026 at 09:19:40AM -0400, ocean-spectrum-hut%duck.com@localhost wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I've found a '97 Pentium I @ 200 MHz machine sitting on top of the dumpster
> and I decided to give it a second chance. The HDD is gone, so the PC is
> diskless at the moment as I am waiting for an IDE to SD card adapter to
> arrive. I want to install an up-to-date OS on it, and I am trying out live
> distributions. The computer cannot boot from USB natively, but it can using
> the Plop boot utility. It can boot from a CD without any problems. I have
> tested the memory, and it's OK. I have managed to boot and successfully run
> the FreeDOS live CD. Let's move on to NetBSD.
> 
> I have created a NetBSD CD (from NetBSD-10.1-i386.iso) and I have tried to
> boot from it. During the boot, NetBSD displays only the following:

Around that time, there were still two different methods supported by PC
BIOSes for booting from CD: emulated floppy and emulated hard disk.  If the
BIOS supports only emulated floppy, it's concievable to me that the primary
boot block might load, but it might not be able to use the BIOS to read the
blocks needed to do any more.  I'm not sure whether that's consistent with
the reported symptom, though.

It was definitely a time when it was still necessary to use actual floppies
to boot and install some machines, though.