Subject: Ye Olde Floppy Trouble...
To: None <port-mac68k@netbsd.org>
From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Peter_Fr=F6hlich?= <phf@cs.ucr.edu>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 05/19/2005 02:21:12
Hi all,

So I finally got around to borrowing a USB floppy drive. I downloaded 
both the 7.something network access disk and the two 6.0.8 disks, just 
to have something to get started with regarding putting NetBSD on my 
ancient Macs. Here's my sad story so far... :-/

First I tried copying the image files to disks using the "Disk Utility" 
thing that comes with OS X. This seemed to write the whole image, but 
at the end of the process I always got some kind of verification error. 
When I mounted the floppy again, it was unreadable after this, OS X 
wanted to format it again. :-/

Next I formatted the floppies with Mac OS Standard format, mounted the 
disk images directly, and copied the content to the floppy by just 
dragging. Fine, now I had that stuff my floppy. But of course I already 
had nagging doubts about the procedure: I am not familiar enough with 
low-level Mac details, but I remembered from my Amiga days that there's 
probably a boot-sector or something that I am missing since I only 
copied the files, not the whole disk image.

So I went home (the USB drive is at school and I can't take it with me 
for various reasons) and popped in the disks. None of them booted. I 
tried holding down all kinds of keys, but even when I stopped the Mac 
from accessing it's hard drive, it would just spit the floppy I made 
right back at me.

Alright, long sad story, brief question: Is there *any* way I can use 
the old Mac itself to just write boot sectors to those floppies? It is 
running 7.1 right now from its hard drive, but I am not even sure where 
to look for such a feature. If that's not possible, what is the 
*proper* way to write these disk images from OS X, including boot 
sectors? How do I get around the weird verification error?

Thanks,
Peter
--
Peter H. Froehlich <><><><><><> http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~phf/
OpenPGP: ABC2 9BCC 1445 86E9 4D59  F532 A8B2 BFAE 342B E9D9