on 3/20/00 1:31 PM, Georg Schwarz at schwarz@physik.tu-berlin.de wrote
something like:

>> on the FD, mine was not. c.) format the floppy on the VS with t 70 at >>>
>> and THEN dd the boot image to the floppy and try again. If the disk formats
>> on the VS with no problems and still won't boot after that then I doubt you
>> or your machine are at fault.
> 
> I did that (as DX23). Now (on Linux) I get:
> 
> dd if=boot.fs of=/dev/fd0
> dd: /dev/fd0: Input/output error
> 15+0 records in
> 14+0 records out
> 
> This is on a SparcStation 10 running Linux. So far I had not had any
> floppy problems whatsoever with it. I wrote tons of PC boot disks on
> it. Do I need some extra parameters?

    You may need to add bs=512 (or is it 4096?) ; possibly use rfd0 in place
of fd0, although I'm not very familiar with Linux yet.

    I think that "DEC" FD's are generally pretty reliable and accurate
devices, but it could be that the 23's heads are out of alignment or too
accurate/blind to read sometimes. I've written boot disks on my PowerMac
with SunTar to boot NetBSD that work fine, take the same disk with the vax's
boot.fs and it doesn't work in my VS3100.

Chris

-- 

Murphy was an optimist.