> From: Tim Rightnour <root@garbled.net>
   >
   >
   > 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.
   
   Wow, does that really work?  Don't you have to at least drop a sparc
   disklabel onto it, do the mount, and then go back to an alpha disklabel by
   rewriting the label and alpha bootblocks with cross-compiled utilities on
   the sparc? (A second drive, even an crummy old tiny one would really make
   this a lot easier, because then you could obviously dd(1) cdhdtape onto it
   and then rewrite the labels and stuff from NetBSD/alpha.)

this works for the 'c' partition.  :-)  i have used this a number of times.