On Fri, Sep 17, 1999 at 06:10:42PM -0700, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> I don't think that's the stumbling block. We've distributed diskimgages of
> boot disks before. The problem is that the only tools to make the disk
> images run under MacOS, and most of the folks making the disks don't run
> MacOS. Thus it's hard to generate disk images.

If that's the only problem, then I'll walk into the next room and make
a disk image.

I recall, though, that Disk Copy never gets to read the floppy that
you insert to make the copy, because Mac OS grabs it and insists you
initialize or eject it. Checking now...

Yep, there is no way to make a copy of the NetBSD boot floppy from
within Mac OS. I tried with Disk Copy (from Apple), ShrinkWrap, and
ImageMaster (the latter two from the same third-party source). All of
them, when you choose "Make Image from Disk..." it pops up an Apple
Toolbox dialog to select the disk. When you put the NetBSD boot floppy
in the drive, the Finder takes over, tries to read the disk, can't,
and demands you eject or initialize it.

A lower-level tool will have to be used to make this work, which means
that end-users will have to download a lower-level tool to format the
disk at their end, which is no improvement on the current situation,
as one can use Suntar on macs to perform the dd operation.

       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net