The NEXTSTEP/OpenStep FAQ

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4.27 How do I customize BuildDisk to create a bootable disk of my own configuration?

BuildDisk, customization The BuildDisk application is extremely limited in terms of the types of disks configuration it knows how to build. Essentially it "knows" about swapdisks, optical disks, 330 and 660 MB SCSI disks. If you wish to do custom configurations you should look at existing BLD script files in /etc/BLD.* There is a script which you can use to specify which BLD script you are using, which disktab entry, and other useful parameters in /usr/etc/builddisk

Some things to note:

the fstab installed on the target disk is specified in the newclient command in the BLD script. standard fstabs are extracted from /usr/template/client/fstab.*
the BLD scripts do not put down a new boot block on the scsi disk, you may want to install one by hand using the /usr/etc/disk program.
some disks boot fine but NeXTstep comes up with a blank window and no login window. This is due sometimes to forgetting to install an accessible /NextLibrary/{Fonts,Sounds}. In general you need quite a lot of things to make a bootable disk.

You can build a minimally usable bootable floppy (for crash recovery purposes). There is a modified version of builddisk (to make it support building floppies, a minimal change) and a BLD script to build the boot floppy available at cs.orst.edu in next/sources/Bootfloppy.tar.Z. (I put this together in response to several requests.) A newer version of Bootfloppy for 2.1 is on the archives as next/sources/util/Bootfloppy2.1.tar.Z. Also available from the archives is BootFloopy 3.x (for --- you guessed it --- NEXTSTEP 3.x). I might also add that one can improve on disk usage while enhancing functionality. BuildDisk (which is used by the various BootFloppy scripts) just copies the standard binaries for ls, mv, cp aso. from /bin. These binaries are statically linked as shipped by NeXT which makes them huge. (e.g. /bin/ls is 106496 bytes large. /usr/local/bin/gls with more features is just 16268 bytes). If you replace these binaries by the BSD or GNU equivalents you can save several hundred kBytes on your boot floppy. This extra diskspace can be used for tar, dump and more tools which makes the boot floppy actually usable. Tested.

(continue with 4.28 Are there any more dwrites useful for the workspace, ...?)

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