On Mon, 24 Mar 2003 14:27:09 EST, Ranjiniganesh@aol.com wrote:

> I have a SparcStation 10 with a floppy drive. Currently it has a
> very old  version of SunOS which is broken. I am trying to scratch it
> and build netbsd 1.6 on  it. I tried building 2 floppies from the 1.6
> release - but they did not work.  I downloaded the floppy images from
> the netbsd ftp side and used rawrite on  my pc to write them to the
> floppy.

When I was given my SparcStation 10 I was told the floppy drives are
notoriously unreliable.  True to form, I never got it to boot from floppy,
which is how I learned about netbooting.  In theory, it's possible to
netboot your Sun box using services provided by your Win32 box.  I don't
know how well theory and practice coincide.  

It does plant the seed of an idea, however, not that that's any help to
you. :(  If there were a "Live" CD for i386 preconfigured as a boot server
for all the various architectures, your installation would be accomplished
quickly.  All that would be required would be to describe the network and
add a symlink for your Sun's Ethernet address to the appropriate bootfile.
 

I'm not saying you *can't* boot from floppy, only that many such boxes
can't.  

--jkl