Earlier I wrote about problems booting my upgraded system from my
NetBSD-dedicated SCSI drive:

> 0 > boot scsi-int/sd@1:0 RESETing SCSI bus
> RESETing SCSI bus
>  can't OPEN: scsi-int/sd@1:0
>  ok
> 0 >

While the above problem persists, I have now managed to boot my
upgraded system using a floppy.  I'm "of course" connected to a net
where anonymous DHCP is accepted, so net-booting is not as
convenient or easy as it could be.  Oh, BTW, neither is floppy
booting when I want to upgrade my kernel, since physical presence is
required since the macppc doesn't have a floppy driver yet.  "Oh,
well."

In the process I discovered the following shortcomings:

 o ofwboot.xcf is apparently required if you're going to try to
   boot from an MS-DOS formatted floppy.

 o ofwboot.xcf does apparently not get installed by default by a
   "make release".  The only two copies I found on ftp.netbsd.org
   was in the February snapshot (not the June one!), and in
   wrstuden's personal misc directory.

 o I tried wrstuden's copy of ofwboot.xcf on an MS-DOS floppy;
   booted with "fd:1,ofwboot.xcf -a", and it started the boot
   loader but was unable to load netbsd (I/O error, I seem to
   remember, but that might be misleading).  So much for that
   attempt.  (I first tried using ofwboot.elf, but OF said "unknown
   file format" or something to that effect.)

 o The June snapshot available on ftp.netbsd.org does not contain
   a floppy disk boot image.  The February 5th one does (1.4R
   vintage).  Isn't construction and installation of a floppy
   disk boot image automated as part of the "make release"
   process?  (Hm, I seem to remember seeing comments about the
   boot floppy image being too large, so that may be the reason.)

In the end I managed to boot the February 5 1.4R install floppy image,
and did a chroot, mount -vat ffs and "sh /etc/rc" dance so that I
could build a new kernel where I nailed down the SCSI disk for the
root file system and which also contained an explicit root FS setting.
However, I could not construct a boot image since the install floppy
doesn't have vnd devices (bummer!).  What I ended up doing was using
the 1.4.2 boot image, transfer it to a sparc (big-endian; all my other
little-endian systems still run 1.4.2 vintage code, so I can't mount
the BE file system on the boot image), mounting it as a vnd image and
replacing netbsd in the boot image with the gzipped custom kernel, and
using that boot floppy to boot my system multi-user (whew!).

I'll later try to re-installboot my NetBSD SCSI disk to see if that
will improve matters -- we'll see.

Regards,

- H=E5vard