RS/6000 7043-140 boot floppies

[Alan Perry]

On 2/18/19 10:42 AM, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 12:49 PM Alan Perry via cctech 
> <cctech at classiccmp.org <mailto:cctech at classiccmp.org>> 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.
>
>
> I'd strongly suggest setting up a netboot server. You'll need 
> dhcp/bootp and tftp, but it's way better than trying to deal with 
> floppy disks and floppy booting.  I've used it succesfully for NetBSD 
> and Linux on a '140.
>
> I never tried Solaris, because I have no interest in Solaris, but it 
> should work the same there.

Thanks.

I prefer floppy because I am usually putting systems back together away 
from a network connection. But, if that is what it takes to get an 
usable OS onto the system, I guess I will cobble together the pieces to 
do that.

But now I am more inclined to install Solaris on it :)

alan

>
> Pat