Hello,

I'm new to netbsd but I've already spent quite a few hours researching
this, so please bear with me.

My ultimate goal is to read some HDs written on a sun3/SunOS 4.1.1.
I've been steered to netbsd because of its good support for multiple
architectures and the apparent capability to mount the SunOS (SCSI)
disks with their different endianness.  I have installed netbsd 2.0
on an IDE disk (P3 computer, i386) and have plugged one of the sun3
disks I want to read on an adaptec 2940 UW controller.  The controller
is recognized as ahc1.  The boot process recognizes the attached drive
but netbsd doesn't see/recognize it as sd0.

First question: I presume this is normal behavior for a foreign FS
and the standard kernel?  I downloaded the first CD (iso image) and
burned a CD locally, that's how I installed netbsd on that computer.

Is is possible to set some parameter that would allow mounting the
disk and/or make sense of the sunOS fs without recompiling a new kernel?
I presume not, and thus the main question.

The standard installation can't configure the 3Com 3c589 pcmcia card
plugged into a pcmcia to PCI adapter.  After researching the issue
quite extensively, I gather that options

PCIC_ISA_ALLOC_IOBASE=0x300
PCIC_ISA_ALLOC_IOSIZE=0x0FF

have to be set.  I understand that this can be done while recompiling
the kernel, but the installation doesn't seem to have the kernel source.
Since I don't have use of the network card to download it, is it
possible to configure this in the running (default) kernel?
Config -x doesn't show these parameters. 

Can someone suggest a way to have use of the network card without
having to get/compile a new kernel?  Or a way to read the sun3 disks
with the kernel that came with the first CD/iso?  If I can use the
network card, I can then DL the kernel source and recompile/reconfigure
it, so maybe that should be the first step.  Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Augustine

PS, I'm trying to do it like this because the sun3 in question no longer
has a boot disk (it crashed) and has other hw problems (mem errors, the
tape drive from which the os tapes load eats the tapes).

PPS Both openbsd and freebsd (that I've tried already) had no problem
properly initializing the pcmcia network card.  They can't seem to read
the sunOS FS with the "wrong" endianness.