I understand that this is possibly a taboo question and I will fully understand if my post is edited or deleted, but... I'm very frustrated and thought I would at least give it a try.
Some of you may have downloaded a NeXT image from certain P2P networks. I happen to be in the same boat. I've got this installation image for SPARC/HPPA, but cannot seem to get it onto a disc in the right way.
Inspecting the image, it shows using the Unix 'file' utility as a "Sun disklabel with bootblock." Seems close enough. I was even able to load the image into vi and spot some text data within the file that verifies that this is an NS install image.
However, once the image is burned to a CD, I cannot boot it on my SS5, nor can I even mount the CD in any operating system. Attempting to 'boot cdrom' returns nothing besides "Can't boot from cdrom" The CD can not be viewed or mounted in Windows or Unix - it appears as a blank CD to Windows, and unmountable in Unix, though does appear to contain a "valid" disklabel.
So, what I'm asking is.. Have any of you downloaded one of these available images and successfully booted/installed from them? I don't want to suggest where to get these images, nor do I want anyone to suggest to me where I can or cannot find one that works. I simply want to know if anyone has had any luck using ANY NS CD image, and if so, how they burned it.
Again, I understand if this post goes against what the site is about, but.. I'm real desperate to get this to work to at least TRY it on my Sun. I have no problem purchasing NS media and will eventually do that in all likelihood.
In short, yes, it is possible to boot a Sun box from a CD-R of NeXTStep 3.3. In the past I've seen this this on a SS5 with the original internal 4x Toshiba drive. A proper ISO should require nothing more than a vanilla "burn disc image" operation in Nero with no crazy options other than the slowest burn possible for good measure. I keep a first-gen 2x SCSI CD-R drive (the cacheless IDE ones from that era were absolute crap, buffer underruns galore) in service especially for my crusty old CD-capable boxes to get the bulletproof single-speed burns they tend to prefer.
The ISO I referenced before wasn't obtained via P2P, AFAIK. But depending on the P2P network/client you used (one without file fingerprinting?), my guess is that you simply have an image with enough bitflips during download to corrupt it. Situations like this, an MD5 checksum to cross-check against the source would be very handy, but obviously you don't have access to the source... tough position to be in.
Anyways, hope that helps.
-A