Ross Harvey drunkenly mumbled...
> [ attempted 4mm tape boot on a 3000, well, this should be good :-) ]

oh great. :)

explain.  am i attempting to do the impossible?  if so i'd like to know now so
i can just bite the bullet and do the netboot/install.

> First, you should probably tell us exactly how you made the tape.
> 
> The install doc gives two totally different sets of tape-making instructions.
> One elementary tar command example in the indep section and then some
> different and very alpha-specific instructions later.

dd if=cdhdtape bs=512 of=/dev/nrst0
dd if=base.tar bs=512 of=/dev/nrst0
dd if=misc.tar bs=512 of=/dev/nrst0
dd if=etc.tar bs=512 of=/dev/rst0

> Also, should you get it to boot, it's going to be interesting to see if
> sysinst can be tricked into reading a tape. Perhaps you could ^z and read
> the tape into the local filesystem.

i would solve that problem by not using sysinst since i hate it.  i always
figured that part of the beauty of NetBSD was that i could just untar it, edit
a file or two, reboot, and have a running system.  never ever used sysinst to
get NetBSD onto a system, and doubt i'm gonna start any time soon.

> The 3000's use "old SRM" and it has a couple of serious bugs in tape
> handling, but last time I tried it I had worked around all of them.

is there a "least broken" version of the SRM for the 3000 i should maybe look
for (if it can be found at all that is)

>     (fingers crossed)

you and me both.

-brian