On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 09:49:30AM -0800, Alan Perry via cctech wrote: > > Is there some trick to making boot floppies for the RS/6000 7043-140 > (a mid-90s PReP architecture machine)? > [...] > The NetBSD boot floppy images are confusing to me. The files are too > large to fit on a 1.44M floppy. I didn't see instructions on how to > make boot floppies out of the .fs files one can download in the > install instructions. I went ahead and tried to dd the part that > fits onto a 1.44M floppy and try to boot that and of course that > failed. I have e-mailed the NetBSD prep mailing list and no response > from that. > > The system does boot the AIX install on one of its hard disks, but > this is a recycled system and I don't have usernames/passwords for > that install. > > Does anyone here have a suggestion on how to proceed?
I have not much of idea about RS6000 but had a peek around netbsd.org and they have page about running NetBSD on emulators of various kind. So you may want to experiment with prep emulator, which seems to be GXemul: http://www.NetBSD.org/ports/emulators.html http://www.NetBSD.org/ports/emulators.html#gxemul and, for example, see if said floppy images boot at all. A casual check of generic.fs gives me this: => (591 12): curl -O 'https://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-8.0/prep/installation/floppy/generic.fs' % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 2597k 100 2597k 0 0 3251k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 3588k => (591 13): file generic.fs generic.fs: x86 boot sector; partition 1: ID=0x41, active, starthead 0, startsector 0, 2879 sectors, code offset 0x0 You have new mail in /var/mail/tomek => (591 14): fdisk -l generic.fs Disk generic.fs: 2 MB, 2659840 bytes 2 heads, 18 sectors/track, 144 cylinders, total 5195 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System generic.fs1 * 0 2878 1439+ 41 PPC PReP Boot -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com **
