On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Henry B. Hotz wrote:

> >  > I have been able to boot an MS-DOS floppy created by copying
> >>  ofwboot.xcf and the install kernel to the floppy on a 7500 and a
> >>  PowerBook (PDQ), but only by setting load-base to 500000 instead of
> >>  the recommended 600000 in both cases.  I find this preferable to
> >>  hunting up a way to create the official boot floppy under MacOS.
> >
> >Did it matter that the address was 500000, or was it just that it was not
> >600000? I've found with netbooting, that 640000 works. Basically ANY
> >address other than the load address works. :-)
> >
> >I think what happens is that the loader uses load-base as a scratch area,
> >and then copies the loaded file (ofwboot.xcf) to where it's supposed to
> >be.
>
> I thought the load address was 6C0000.  I forget the command to check
> that in 1.5.2 release.  I didn't try 4000.  I just tried a random
> other number to see if it made a difference.

ofwboot USED to load at 6c0000, but we ran into problems, so we moved it
to 600000.

> Note that 600000 works fine with the boot floppy image.  I thought
> the netbsd install kernel and the ofwboot.xcf were supposed to be the
> same with the same load addresses.

No, the kernel and ofwboot have different load addresses. owboot is at
600000, and the kernel starts at 100000.

Right about the floppy image; my findings were that for floppy loading,
load-base had to match where the file should get loaded, and for
netbooting it should *NOT* match.

> I agree that it isn't really hard, given a web browser and an
> internet connection to go get suntar and write the boot floppy image.
> But when I'm setting up a green machine for NetBSD I'd like the
> minimum required tools to get started.  If the floppy image were
> packaged so it would work with DiskCopy directly that would be nice
> since that tool is usually on the Mac OS CD-ROMs.  (At best, and at
> worst it's no harder to get than SunTar.)

Unfortunatly I'm not sure if we know how to make diskcopy images. :-(

I thougth the newer versions could handle a raw file but I'm not sure.

Take care,

Bill