I used to be able to use Sun floppies when they were BRAND NEW.

I don't think I've had a good Sun floppy experience for 8 or 10 years.
I usually keep a diskless boot env around if only for when I manage
to hurt my test/build machine (removing libc.so* for example).

For the 100-200MB of disk it takes, it's worthwhile to have around.

I could mutter something about blowing air throught the drive and
remove dust.  I could say something about burning the floppy image
to CD, but I'm not sure what NetBSD offers for that.

Quoting Ranjiniganesh@aol.com (Ranjiniganesh@aol.com):
>  

> From: Ranjiniganesh@aol.com
> Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 07:45:23 EST
> To: port-sparc@netbsd.org
> Subject: 1.6 disk2 problem
> X-Mailer: 7.0 for Windows sub 10502
> 
>  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.
> 
> The first disk kept coming back with wrong magic number / sun label etc. 
> Then i read through the archives and  found a build at 
> ftp://releng.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-1-6/200303010000/sparc/install
> 
> ation/floppy
> 
> The first floppy now boots fine - but the second one does not work. Can 
> anyone
> tell me where to get a working image of the second image?
> 
> The problem with the second disk is:
> 
> I have a brand new box of floppies and if i try the rawrite version from the 
> net
> bsd site - half through writing it come back saying error writing to disk. If 
> I try
> a version of rawrite from the internet - it writes the disk without errors.
> 
> When i boot from floppy with boot floppy netbsd - it boots the first floppy 
> fine
> and asks for the second floppy. When i put in the second floppy i get the
> following error.
> 
> Floppy device to load the installation utilities from [/dev/rfd0a]:
> Extracting installation utilities...
> fd0a: hard error reading fsbn 0
> fd0: controller status: state 17 (st0 70<abnrml,seek_cmplt,drv_chck> cyl 0)
> fd0a: hard error reading fsbn 0 of 0-127
> fd0: controller status: state 17 (st0 70<abnrml,seek_cmplt,drv_chck> cyl 0)
> tar: End of archive volume 1 reached
> 
> ATTENTION! tar archive volume change required.
> Ready for archive volume: 1
> Input archive name or "." to quit tar.
> Archive name >
> 
> and that never works.
> 
> Can anyone help me out here? I have ftp running on my PC and have downloaded
> the binary sets and all i need now is for the second floppy to work and then 
> i can
> download / complete the entire installation.
> 
> I have tried the floppy images from the iso image, standard installation and 
> the
> latest version i could find - all have the same problem.