On 08-Mar-01 Brian Hechinger wrote:
> so, can i just stick that drive back in my Sun box,
> mount the root filesystem and copy the alpha kernel to the disk, or is there
> a problem with Sun mounting alpha UFS?  if so, can i dd cdhdtape to slice c
> or
> will that destroy my install?  it would be trivial to reinstall the OS, but
> i'd like to try the "alternate" method first.

Well.. there are a few possible problems here.

1) A sun can read an "alpha" UFS, they are both BSD ffses.  The problem is the
endian of them, thats what the FFS_EI kernel option solves.  If you have that
option compiled in your kernel on the sparc, than yes.. you can read/write the
filesystem.  I doubt you have this option however.

2) Asuming that's not the case..or even if it is..  you could dd your cdhdtape
image to the swap partition of your disk, rather than the whole thing.  Of
course, this assumes that NetBSD/sparc can read a NetBSD/alpha disklabel.  I'm
not wholly sure on that.

3) Yes.. writing to slice c (the whole disk slice) will definately destroy your
installation of the OS.

---
Tim Rightnour <root@garbled.net>
NetBSD: Free multi-architecture OS http://www.netbsd.org/
NetBSD supported hardware database: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/hw.cgi