Hello John,

Personally I create boot floppies on a FreeBSD also, I've not worried about
the bs=36k part though, and I've used the raw device.

Just do a 'dd if=boot.fs of=/dev/rfd0'.
Another couple of things I found was that Open Firmware won't handle
disk errors.
I had alot of problems booting from the floppy due to a slightly bad
floppy disk.
Try dd'ing to image back off the floppy on the FreeBSD box, and then
checking using md5
that the image is the same as the original boot.fs
I also found that the 1.1.1 release boot image always CLAIM failed on
first attempt
when booting on a PowerBook G3, but second attempt worked.


Hope this may help,

Matt.


John Ryan wrote:
> 
> I'm new to both Macs and NetBSD.  I've got one of those beige coloured G3s
> with an ATA disk.  I've managed to get to an open firmware boot prompt and
> it reports to be Open Firmware 2.4
> 
> I've downloaded boot.fs from netbsd.org and used fdformat then "dd
> if=boot.fs of=/dev/fd0 bs=36k" from both a FreeBSD box and a Linux box.
> 
> When I put this disk in my G3 and type boot fd:0 it replies with "CLAIM
> failed"  I've tried several disks and the floppy drive seems to work under
> MacOS.
> 
> Thanks in advance
> John Ryan
> Systems Manager
> King George V School
> Hong Kong