>Colin asked:
>did you enable the ports in the booter?  for some powerbooks i believe you
>need to check one of the boxes in the serial dialog box to make sure that
>they are powered up under netbsd.

** Well Colin, you win the cigar and I now officially qualify for the "OH
DUH!" award. Yes, I discovered the box in the 'serial port' section of the
booter, and when I checked it off the modem ran without a hitch. Spent the
rest of the day running FTP.

>
>where in the boot did it panic, and what exactly was the panic message?

** Well first of all, I found out that Hauke Fath posted on an apparently
identical problem in the archives dated 3/13/00, though I don't think he
was using a powerbook 170. I get all the way through the device id's (which
appear to be normal) and just a line past the PRAM announcement (that the
PRAM time doesn't appear to have been read correctly) when I get
   panic: cn open: cn_tab->cndev==NODEV.
   then I get put in the debugger.
This was with both kernels, in single user mode, even booting from the mac
side one time. 1.4.3 is running famously, even as I speak.

Thanks very much for the help. Let me know if I can do anything, (keeping
in mind that I am pretty much a non-geek newbie)
>-colin




Clarence Carlson
Itinerant Philosophers of Iowa, LTD