On Wed, 21 May 1997 09:47:28 +0000 
 "Mike Grommet" <mgrommet@ns.insolwwb.net> wrote:

 > I have hooked the drive up to a freebsd system
 > in order to dd the distribution files to the drive.  I've been running
 > freebsd and BSDI for quite a bit but have never had to do this
 > before...

...well, hopefully the NetBSD/alpha installation procedure will see some
improvement soon... esp. now that we can install NetBSD/alpha boot blocks
onto CD-ROMs.

 > I tried to dd the file RZ_25IMA (the rz_25 image file) to the disk by
 > doing this: dd if=RZ_25IMA of=/dev/sd1
 > 
 > and it gives me an error mesg:
 > 
 > sd1:  invalid primary partition table: no magic
 > 
 > 
 > What am I missing here?

Looks like you've discovered a neat little "feature" in FreeBSD.  They
sort of require that disks have a DOS MBR partition table on the disk
to define the disk's "slices".  You'll probably need to fdisk (or whatever
the FreeBSD equivalent is) the disk to define the MBR... although I 
don't know what NetBSD/alpha is going to think of that :-)

Do you have another system from which to dd the image?  Alternatively,
any FreeBSD folks who might read this know how to work around this lossage?

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
NAS: M/S 258-6                                          Work: 415.604.0935
Moffett Field, CA 94035                                Pager: 415.428.6939