David,

On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, David Friggens wrote:

> I've successfully installed NetBSD from my DOS partition, but I would still 
> appreciate any hints on the floppy problem. I figure I must be missing 
> something relatively obvious, which should make it difficult to solve 
> myself. :)

> >Hi. I'm trying to install 1.5 on an old 486 with 16Mb of RAM, ~300Mb HD, & 
> >no modem, network, or CDROM.

Just like my laptop, except I used slip to install over a serial line.

> >I read the install file and thought I was fine - partitioning was fairly 
> >easy (compared to what I thought it would be) and the install seems fine. 
> >Except that I can't figure out how to get at the set files.

Assuming you are talking about the set_name.xx sets, I also don't see any
sets/Split subdirectory (at least not at
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.5/i386/binary/sets/).

> >I tried RaWrite-ing the *.tgz files onto floppies, but RaWrite breaks down 
> >and says there's a disk error in sector one. (For every disk I've tried.) 

As you've noticed rawrite is the wrong tool and the files are too big.
(rawrite is for taking a disk image that already has the filesystem
information in it and placing it on a disk.)

> >The install file is a little vague about this point. It says copy all of 
> >the set_file.xx files onto disks. I'm now thinking that it doesn't mean 

(I guess you mean "set_name.xx.) I am not sure where they are located.

> >using RaWrite (that's only for the boot disks). But the .tgz files are too 
> >big for floppies to be directly copied.
> >Does "set_file.xx" mean:
> >=> the *.tgz files
> >=> the *.tar files inside them (even bigger!)
> >=> or the variously named files inside the .tar ones (though some of these 
> >are too big for a floppy, notably the kernel)

The INSTALL document says: "The split sets are named set_name.xx ... All
of these files except the last one of each set should be exactly 240,640
bytes long." Basically, they are just the gzipped tarfiles split up, as
indicated by:
    The split distributions may be reassembled and extracted with cat as
    follows:

           # cat set_name.?? | ( cd / ; tar -zxpf - ) 

Anyways, once you can find these split sets, you can copy them on to
preformated (non-system) MS-DOS disks and use the sysinstall to
"get_via_floppy". I have never used this method to install, but I hope
some of this info helps.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/