On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 11:23:32AM -0400, Louis  Guillaume wrote:
> Hello,

Hello. Sorry about the delay here, my hard disk and internet gateway
died recently (amazing coincidence), and I've only just gotten things
working enough for email.

> It's amazing to see that we can boot an SE/30 without the Mac OS! The 
> floppy image posted by Nyef works well, booting the installer kernel.

Ah, independant verification. Thank you.

> How would I go about creating a boot floppy image that loads a kernel 
> which looks for root on nfs?
> 
> I've got the kernel, it's just a matter of getting it into a reasonable 
> floppy image.

Use dd to split the disk image into two files at the 8k mark. Untar the
second part to get the stage2 file. Get the source archive for the boot
code, and look in the readme for the command to create a new tar file
(yes, the kernel must have that name). Concatenate the old first part
(the stage1 load) with the new ustar file. Write to disk. Enjoy.

> Another issue is - this is an experimental machine: our network admins 
> won't edit the dhcp server to point netboot requests at the appropriate 
> machine. How can I either prompt for the NFS server containing the root 
> filesystem, or hard code it? This of course after we've received a valid 
> address from dchp.

Sorry, can't help you here.

> This would be very useful since we can't yet boot directly from the hard 
> drive.

If you don't mind experimenting and reformatting the hard drive in the
SE/30, you might try partitioning the drive with a 2meg or so HFS
partition and the rest for NetBSD however you want it. Boot the installer
from floppy. Once you have a kernel handy, create a new boot disk image
with it, and put it in the HFS partition (overwriting the HFS filesystem).
This may or may not work, but it's worth a shot. It will also mean that
you will need to reformat the disk before it will play nice with MacOS.

> Any help would be fantastic,
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Louis

Hope this helps.