Ok I've a similar problem here with my Cube as I do with the toughbook - I've exhausted the need for NetBSD through netbooting and now with to run NeXTSTEP on this system. It's a v2 rom, so can't boot directly from CD. There are no internal drives, apart from a new, blank 18Gb SCSI hard drive. I have one external SCSI AppleCD drive. 2.88Mb SCSI floppy drives currently cost a small fortune, as would their appropriate disks and so on.
Does anyone have suggestions as to the best way of getting this machine up and running with NeXTSTEP?
Your main options are to do a network install or to put your HD in an external enclosure and use the BuildDisk utility to copy the system files over. Both of these options require a running 68K machine.
Depending on your location, this might not be feasible. You might be able to find someone to mail your HD to who could set it up. I set up a HD for someone once this way. But I am in Germany. I think Rob Blessin from Black Hole has set up HDs for people before. I'm not sure if he's still doing it, but it might be worth a try.
Maybe someone else might have a good idea.
The NeXT 2.88 floppy drives often show up on eBay. Check out seller mrdju.
Handy. Except I live in Northern Ireland, it'd be far too much on postage. A network install sounds ideal, or is it even possible enough to netboot some loader that could continue installing from the NeXTSTEP user CD? I haven't been able to find anything on the forums here regarding this problem (though maybe I haven't looked hard enough)
@bkmoore The network install method looks the most applicable for me.
I have setup my NS3.3 VMware installation properly in order to netinstall my cube client. The only problem is I cannot generate a NeXT floppy (can only generate an Intel floppy) plus.. I don't have a floppy drive on my cube anyway!
Can anyone help me initiate this over net
boot? I'm not sure what information is stored on the netinstall boot floppy, and if it's important to determine where the client tries to netinstall from, so if it's useful, the intel boot floppy image is located here (
http://scmweb.infj.ulst.ac.uk/~B00537009/intelboot.img).
Stealthii,
Did you check the online documentation on how to do a netboot / install? It should be in the System Administration documentation in the /NextLibrary directory. There is a manual on how to do this, and you should not need a boot floppy for a NeXT Computer.
You do need a running Next installation with two partitions. One has the system on it. The second partition has the configuration files for each network client. You can create this in vmware by adding a second HD image and a second controller driver. There is a Next Answer on how to configure the IRQ and DMA for the second card.
I have never done a network install myself and I am not sure if it will work from an intel to a Next. I always thought both systems had to have the same architecture because the client machine boots off of the root partition of the server. But maybe someone else can provide more info.
Also, I have a Next Station but I wasn't aware that the internal 2.88 floppy is a SCSI device. It doesn't show up when I run the SCSI polling utility. Is it on a separate bus? Can anyone provide more info on this?
Good luck and if you get a network install from vmware to Next to work, please post how you did it. I am sure others would be interested in this. This question comes up from time to time, so it would be good to add to the FAQ knowledge base.
Brian Moore