Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!bnrgate!brtph3!brchh104!brchs1!bnr.ca!rice.edu!sun-spots-request From: sjg@sun0.melb.bull.oz.au (Simon J. Gerraty) Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun Subject: Re: How do you make a bootable floppy? Keywords: Miscellaneous Message-ID: <1493@brchh104.bnr.ca> Date: 30 Jan 91 13:27:26 GMT Sender: news@brchh104.bnr.ca Organization: Sun-Spots Lines: 44 Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu X-Refs: Original: v10n23 X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 30, message 4 X-Note: Submissions: sun-spots@rice.edu, Admin: sun-spots-request@rice.edu In <1289@brchh104.bnr.ca> sld@beach.cis.ufl.edu writes: >Is it possible (without enormous pain) to make a bootable floppy for a >SPARCstation or a 386i? We have about 20 386i's and in the course of a >... >Here is the procedure we have tried: >1. fdformat (fdformat knows to use /dev/rfd0c) >2. newfs /dev/rfd0c (or mkfs for 4.0.2 since newfs is broken) Wish I could help more... On SunOS 4.0.2 on a 386i I use: mkfs /dev/rfd0c 2880 18 2 4096 512 8 5 6 The 6 at the end, is 6 revs per second (360 pm) vs the default of 60 (3600). Without this the floppy file system gets corrupted very easily. Even with the above, I find that no amount of sync'ing before umount prevents the diskette from becomming corrupted after a while. It may be necessary to leave the diskette _in_ the drive for some time after unmount (and after the drive light goes out). We had a set of boot floppies for one of our 386i's but of course it failed (before I made a backup). I'd like to be able to make a replacement. >This seems to make an almost booting floppy that reads the kernel file and >starts most of the device drivers. On a SPARCstation the process dies >with the following messages: > fd0: read failed (40 10 0) > fd0: data overrun/underrun > panic: vfs_mountroot cannot mount root This sounds consitent with the rps param to mkfs being wrong. >and on the 386i it crashes a few device drivers later with: Well, I would like to hear if/when you get it working. Simon J. Gerraty