On Sun, 26 Sep 1999, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote:
> 
> I guess you should be able to put the installation FFS, complete with
> bootblock, onto the CD-ROM, but you might have "disk geometry" related 
> problems. Do VAX CD-ROMs pretend to have 512-byte blocks?

Well, i've tried to put the whole install kernel and all other
installfiles onto a CD. There is no problem using the FFS filesystem
on a CD, it boots without complaining. It works great. There is however
one caveat. You can't put a "live" bootable filesystem, complete with all
files on the CD, since NetBSD doesn't support putting the devicefiles on
CD-media. The install kernel is a different beast though, since the whole
filesystem is in the kernel and is put in ram when the kernel boots.

The best way of making a install CD is to make a bootable FFS filesystem
on a harddrive and put the install kernel on it together with all the
distfiles. This must be done on a VAX so that the right bootblocks get
written to the disk. I did this using a 200Meg SCSI disk, and then i made
a image of it by dd-ing from the raw device. The blocksize on the CD
_MUST_ be 512 byte, or else it won't work. This is also true for the
CD-ROM, it _MUST_ be jumpered for 512 byte blocksize. Most SCSI CD's
support this though. The best way of writing the image to the CDR is
probably with CDwrite since none of the commercial CDR programs i've come
across supports writing anything else but ISO-images to the CD.

cheers,
/Anders H

-- 
 
"Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according 
to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs, the 
future, for which I really worked,is mine." 
(Nikola Tesla, 1856-1943)

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