In article <20010129023922.91393.qmail@web9208.mail.yahoo.com>,
buzz <buzz899@yahoo.com> wrote:

Well, let me explain a bit how the floppy images work on the i386,
and why you cannot mount them. The floppy image can span multiple
disks. The first is special because it contains a boot block. 8K
or so into the disk, a tar file starts.  The tar file contains the
kernel, which inside it, has a ram disk which contains the install
root partition. The boot blocks know about ustarfs so they can load
the data and run the kernel. The kernel then mounts the ramdisk
image inside it. You can easily extract the kernel by using dd and
tar, but then it is a bit harder to extract the ramdisk image from
it and put it back. The ramdisk image itself can be mounted and
modified via a loopback mount.

I hope that helps, and that others will correct any info that is
incorrect.

christos

>Well, I just went ahead and built all of the deps,
>tossed my code into the appropriate dirs, and made the
>fdsets.. everything worked very well.. this is my
>first foray into the world of BSD.. but I must say..
>other than not being able to mount disk images in a
>loopback device, it has been painless.. in fact, I
>have built everything from source.. and it all
>compiled with little modding (unlike linux).. all I
>had to do that was a LITTLE kludgy is cp the
>loadfile_macdep.h to /usr/include/machine
>
>Once i get it figured out a bit more.. Im installing
>on my ultra1 and sparc 5 & 10 .. :)
>
>
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