On Mon, 16 Sep 2002 @ 2:05am (-0500), John D. Baker wrote:

JDB> I, too am having trouble with the boot floppy for NetBSD-1.6/sparc.
JDB> As I've seen mentioned, on my SS5 (openboot 2.x), 'boot floppy'
JDB> complains about bad magic number and that it couldn't find Sun
JDB> disklabel.
JDB>
JDB> This is curious because I used exactly the same image when creating
JDB> a bootable (multiboot) CD-ROM and it works just fine.

for 1.6?

from the cd-rom faq:

NetBSD/sparc (top)

    There are three steps involved in making a NetBSD/sparc bootable CD ROM.
      Step 1 is to create an "almost" full ISO 9660 image of whatever you
      want to put on the CD. For example: mkisofs -o output.iso -l -J -r -L
      /cdsources

      Now get a bootable floppy image. For NetBSD-1.5.3/sparc, this image may
	be found at
	ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.5.3/sparc/installation/bootfs/boot.fs.gz
	The final step is to rewrite the ISO image with (a) a sun disklabel
	at the start, (b) the original image at the end, and (c) with the
	right offset/size values in the disklabel for the bootloader. The
	program mksunbootcd will perform this task. If mksunbootcd is not
	installed on your system, it can be installed from the mksunbootcd
	package. If you're creating the image on a non-NetBSD system, you can
	try compiling mksunbootcd on your system. The sources are available
	at ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/mksunbootcd/. To use
	mksunbootcd use the following: mksunbootcd output.iso boot.fs boot.fs
	boot.fs

	The bootable image is listed three times corresponding to what will
	  get booted by a sun4, sun4c and sun4m system respectively. If you
	  have different bootable images for the three machines, or if you
	  also have a bootable image for sun2, sun3, and sun3x systems, you
	  can do something like: mksunbootcd output.iso boot-sun4.fs
	  boot-sun4c.fs boot-sun4m.fs boot-sun3.fs

	  Note that mksunbootcd rewrites the output.iso file, so don't run it
	  multiple times. As a note, this step is fine to perform on a NFS
	  mounted directory. Ie, if your ISO image is on a remote machine, it
	  can be mounted on a NetBSD machine for running mksunbootcd without
	  requiring extreme amounts of data to be transfered over the
	  network.

What is the directory structure of /cdsources? Is the boot.fs looking for a
specific path to a specific file on the cd-rom' s directory structure?
perhaps that's my problem.  I have a custom/non-standard dir. tree.

-lava

JDB>
JDB> If I boot from CD-ROM or tape, I can load the instfs.tgz from the
JDB> second floppy just fine.
JDB>
JDB> I've created the floppies both on an NetBSD-1.5/i386 system and on
JDB> NetBSD-1.6/sparc and the ".../floppy/disk1"  or ".../bootfs/boot.fs"
JDB> image fails to boot.
JDB>
JDB> The NetBSD-1.5.3 floppy set works just fine, though.
JDB>
JDB> --
JDB> John D. Baker                               johnbaker(at)ev(one)(dot)net
JDB> OpenBSD        NetBSD        Darwin/MacOS X        FreeBSD        BSD/OS
JDB> BSD -- The Operating System for the Third Millenium and Beyond!
JDB>

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