At 11:42 AM -0700 7/17/01, "Henry B. Hotz" wrote:

:)I just formatted a 1.44MB floppy as MS-DOS and copied ofwboot.xcf and
:)netbsd.ram.gz onto it.  I renamed the latter to netbsd.gz.
:)
:)It boots on an OF 1.0.5 machine with
:)
:)boot fd:1,ofwboot.xcf netbsd.gz
:)
:)No DiskCopy, no SunTar, no nothing, straight into the installer.
:)Obviously ofwboot got a little smarter somewhere along the line.

That is definitely easier.  The next question is "will it work on all
models that have floppy drives".

Can some people check their other OF 1.0.5 and OF 2.0.x and 2.4 machines to
see if this works?  Once there's enough consensus that this method
universally works, I'm all for changing the instructions/FAQ.

At 3:03 PM -0400 7/17/01, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:

:)Neat. I think we want disk images because the format of that command
:)will be different for different versions of OF, whereas with our
:)boot floppy, all anyone has to do to boot off a floppy (if they have
:)one, of course) is boot fd:0.

I'm not sure it's a problem -- I was under the impression that the DOS
"partition" is always 1.

:)No matter what, telling people to write a disk image to a floppy
:)(especially if they can use Disk Copy to do it) is far more newbie
:)friendly than your technique. (Not that those sans floppy drive
:)aren't going to have to figure out some rendition of the above
:)anyway, though.)

Not really, especially if they have to download suntar and figure out how
it works, or if they have to figure out what OS, type, and creator to use
with DiskCopy.  All this method requires is PC|File Exchange, which has
shipped with MacOS for a *long* time.  From the unix side, a disk image is
easier (one command vs. several to mount, copy, and unmount), but I suspect
that new macppc users are more likely to either a) be starting with only
MacOS experience, or b) unix experience on some other platform that
supports floppy drives.

Those without floppy drive generally have Open Firmware 3 (unless we're
talking a about dead floppy drives).

IMHO, from a simplicity standpoint, copying a few files to a DOS format
floppy is better than writing a disk image.  Besides, it's pretty easy to
verify what's on the floppy.

  -- MW