1) I have seen floppy hardware problems where one OS works and another
does not.
2) More likely: You may be battling an unholy combination of drives
that are each slightly out of alignment and bad boot floppies. Both
happen often enough that you can't discount the possibility that you
are going back and forth between the problems, and as they will both
generate the same results, you are assuming a single problem. You can
have two drives which are each slightly out of alignment in opposite
directions, either can read a "properly" formatted disk, but they
can't read each others disks.
Tips:
1) Use a recycled master disk for your boot disk. I've bought a large
quantity of branded Sony disks which failed at a rate higher than one
bad (or imperfect) disk per box of ten, and while Sony produces very
bad magnetic media in my experience (yes, I know they developed the
4mm DAT drive and the 3.5" floppy -- they still make junk for users to
put in 'em), I've seen disturbingly close results out of most disks
available through consumer channels. This is not an acceptable
failure rate for master disks -- publishers have access to higher
grade disketts than consumers do. Besides, it feels SO GOOD to format
and reuse an Office 4.3 or Windows 95 Upgrade diskette. 8-)
2) To surmount the drive alignment problem, use the same physical
floppy drive to create your boot floppy and to boot your system for
installation. If you can create the disk on the machine you are going
to use, great. If you can't, fine, just remove the drive from the
machine you created it on and put it in the machine you are installing
on. Preformat the floppy under DOS or Windows to make sure it is
perfect before use (rawrite doesn't seem to do any read-after-write
verify, not sure about dd or the other creation programs)
3) Use a bootable CD-ROM, either the OpenBSD disk or make your own. I
think I have used Nero to create a bootable CD under Windows directly
using the OpenBSD floppy image, I've certainly created bootable CDRs
from OpenBSD. Most PII systems can boot off the CD-ROM drive.
Nick.
Kevin Sindhu wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Ok, I've given up!! I have a PII 233 Machine, in which the OpenBSD boot
> floppy just refuses to work! I have tried different floppies, different
> floppy disk images (from 2.8-release to -current), dd/rawrite'd it on
> different archs(Win9x/NT/Linux/Solaris), but the damn thing just doesn't
> boot.
>
> The same floppy works on a different machine without a hitch. Now, I
> thought it might be the disk drive, so I replaced it with another one,
> and tried, and the same problem.
>
> I run into the following two situations, both are completely random, and
> I cannot predict which pop's up when.
>
> 1) boot /bsd failed(5). Will try obsd
>
> 2) Read error.
>
> I have even replaced the disk drive cable and tested it..same results.
>
> Interestingly however, a windows 9x boot disk/linux boot disk and a
> Partition magic boot disk all work on that machine..
>
> I am open to suggestions...
>
> -Kevin
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