On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 10:18:10AM -0800, Jason Fayre wrote:
> 1.  Is it necessary to fdisk the drive prior to putting the netbsd kernel
> on the drive?  (I.E. can I just use the filesstem as-is and put the netbsd
> kernel in /boot?)

Yes, you can simply use the existing ext2 partitions and filesystems.

I do recommend overwriting the non-boot ext2 filesystems with FFS,
though.

> 2.  In order to instal the rest of the OS, it looks like I will have to
> set up a DHCP and and NFS server on another box.  Is this correct?  If so,

Yes.

> I'm assuming I need to follow the procedure in the diskless howto.

But be sure to read the port-cobalt FAQ. They can be slightly
tricky to set up netbooting for.

> If possible, could someone give me a step-by-step on how to make this
> work?

See the list archive at http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-cobalt/ .

> My current situation is:
> I put the kernel in /boot and rename it to vmlinux.gz.  When I reboot the

This should work.

> unit, I get the decompressing kernel message on the serial console.  I
> don't get any output from the BSD kernel.  After about 2 minutes, I get
> some messages from the boot loader stating that it couldn't load the
> kernel because of some kind of disk error.

This usually indicates that the kernel is just slightly larger
than the firmware allows (yes, we need a real boot loader, which
would make the problem go away). Are you using the stock 1.5
GENERIC? That should be small enough to fit, but there may be
differences between firmware revisions that I don't know about.


-- 
Soren