Hello all, I'm new to this list, though I've had an ARC box on a shelf
waiting for an OS for years now.

It's a "NeTpower" box.  Apparently no one has heard of them  :)

Supposedly it's just like any other ARC box, except it has custom video,
which required drivers from NeTpower to use, even in Windoze (NT 3.51).
Apparently the company folded before 4.0 (or didn't care to support it), so 
no drivers were ever produced, and I never actually had the 3.51 drivers.

Moving on... I burned a CD with the arcdiag program (which worked), and
the various current and release kernels, in both ecoff format and not.

None of them will boot from the CD, it gives a general "file not found"
type error.  So I'm guessing that you can't boot an ARC box that way.
Is that a correct assumption?  I noticed in the email I partially quoted
below, that booting from a CD is never mentioned.

I also remember reading that one can pop an IDE card into an ARC box and
use an IDE drive that way--now, I have a SCSI disk so that's not the
problem--but could I put a plain VGA card into this thing and get
"normal" video?

[more stuff inline below with the quote]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 12:09:03PM -0800, bob meader wrote:
> 
> Currently a standalone installation method for NetBSD 'arc'
> doesn't exit.

I'm glad to read that, I just thought I couldn't find it  :-)

> A second way to install the way root filesystem (although
> I have never tried it) is to install the SCSI hardrive
> in an i386 computer and use the NetBSd 'i386'
> boot floppies to make an filesystem. In theory
> this should work as i386 and arc are both little endian.
> If wish to attempt to try this 'alternate' method of
> installation, follow these instructions:

Thanks for this.