Motorola PowerPC board (PReP or something) boot media

[netfreak]

So I've got a Motorola Atlas board with the IBM PPC 604 (https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Motorola_Atlas) and I'm wanting to get NT 4.0 installed. According to this old page https://web-docs.gsi.de/~kraemer/COLLECTION/MOTOROLA/wntps.html it says I need some Motorola specific boot disks. My system boots as far as the "autoboot failed, PPC1-Diag>" line as seen in that article so whatever special PPC boot disks they reference sound like what I need. This board doesn't seem to be the same as the PowerStack line but probably close enough. Basically wondering if anyone has any information on what these items mentioned on that article could mean:

PPC Boot Disk (Available from Motorola)
Arcinst.exe (Available from Motorola)
FW.IMG on disk (Available from Motorola)

 

[NeXT]

I would assume the first place I would start looking is any material pertaining to the PowerStack. Someone must of images and uploaded those diskettes.

 

[netfreak]

I would assume the first place I would start looking is any material pertaining to the PowerStack. Someone must of images and uploaded those diskettes.

Unfortunately so far I've just found some 15+ year old archived usenet posts talking about how they can't find the disks either.

 

[netfreak]

Found fw.img on a motorola archived page from 1997 but the included "mkflop" tool to write it seems to require Win NT on PowerPC to even run... I installed x86 NT 4.0 on a random PC and it wouldn't run it. Still no luck getting that initial boot disk, though I did find a solaris 2.5.1 installer with a specific motorola disk which loads but I really want to get NT going.

 

[Al Kossow]

Found fw.img on a motorola archived page from 1997 but the included "mkflop" tool to write it seems to require Win NT on PowerPC to even run... I installed x86 NT 4.0 on a random PC and it wouldn't run it. Still no luck getting that initial boot disk, though I did find a solaris 2.5.1 installer with a specific motorola disk which loads but I really want to get NT going.

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28953

explains why it will be difficult to find. 'fw.img' is likely a version of the ARC bios you need to run NT.

there is a pointer in that thread to other versions of the fw

being betaarchive, they have something. good luck getting it from them.

 

[netfreak]

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28953

explains why it will be difficult to find. 'fw.img' is likely a version of the ARC bios you need to run NT.

there is a pointer in that thread to other versions of the fw

being betaarchive, they have something. good luck getting it from them.

I got some random ARC disk to start booting but then it just kind of sits there... I also managed to extract the contents of an ARC exe file kickin around and it revealed a mkflop version for i386 so I'm currently trying to get that to write fw.img to a disk. It does actually run in windows 10 but spits out an error about can't read/write to floppy. Need to try it on an older PC.

 

[netfreak]

Wow OK so I ran the i386 floppy maker in an NT 4.0 box and it worked, and my board booted into the newer Motorola firmware:



I think within this area I can do the needed disk work and initiate the NT CD boot.