Does floppy booting work? Is 486 really supported?

kevmif

I'd like to install NetBSD on my 486 (DX4-100 PCI with 16MB RAM). I get to the 6th floppy and it dies with 0x1351034

Initially tried with v9.3. I then tried v8 with no success.

Is this supposed to work or are the floppy images / 486 hardware effectively unmaintained?

I might try the disks in my Pentium 166 and see what happens, but I really want to install on my 486 the traditional way (via floppy).

Yes, it was a pain in the butt trying to stage 6 floppy disks. Also, if a disk fails, the whole installer bails and you have to restart from scratch. No just replace disk 5 and continue. Gotta reboot load all again. Worth it though - if it will work 😛

Thanks

nia

cr1901 is the only other person I know that regularly installs NetBSD from floppy on an actual 486. He's on IRC and a few other platforms. You should talk to each other 🙂

MG_

3.1 running on a P75 here. 9.3 runs too but it takes very long to reach the 80x25 CLI.
What's needed is a i386 9.3 kernel and userland with all modern parts taken out. Youtube has various video's of people running a stripped 9.3 install...

nia

Oh, yeah, anything below 24MB memory will definitely want a stripped down kernel rather than GENERIC with the massive nvidia GPU drivers and stuff included 😅