Hi!

I've got a NetBSD/macppc box at home that ran nicely for months. It's a
powercomputing Powercenter plus. A few days ago, I started experiencing
problems at system startup. The problems sounds like this:

scsibus0: waiting 2 seconds for devices to settle...
probe(esp0:1:0): max sync rate 6.25MB/s
sd0 at scsibus0 target 1 lun 0: <SEAGATE, ST32272N, 0784> SCSI2 0/direct
fixed
sd0: 2157 MB, 6300 cyl, 4 head, 175 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 4419464
sectors
trap type 1400 at 100878
Stopped at      cpu_Debugger+0x10:      lwz r0, r1, 0x14,
db>

At the beginning, I just had to reboot the system, and everything went
back to normal operation. Then it got harder and harder to get it
booting. I needed dozens of reboots to get it working. Now, I cannot
boot anymore.

The problem does not come from the disk. If I boot on floppy, I crash
the same way. I was able to boot after doing a lot of attempts, and I
backuped all my stuff to another disk. I now experience the same
behaviours with the other disk.

Of course, I just try to boot with only one disk connected to the SCSI
bus, everything else is disconnected, my disk has the terminator jumper
set.

A hint: I was not able to enter ddb by pressing the debug button for
weeks. Today, when I opened the box to do my backup, I discovered that a
transistor has get off the logic board. I did soldered it again in the
right place, and now pushing the button drop me again in ddb, so it
seems to work. Is it possible that this caused a permanent damage to
another part of the logic board?

If this is the case (ie: the SCSI chip is kind of dead), I'm looking to
alternative ways of booting. I have an adaptec SCSI board (2940UW), but
it's seems there is no way to boot on it (In of, if I dev to it then
type words, I don't see anything, no "read" so it shouldn't be
bootable). 

So I think about netbooting. But I currently use this machine to work on
bringing LINUX_COMPAT to NetBSD/powerpc. Therefore, I would prefer to
have my kernel on the local disk. Is it possible to netboot ofwboot and
then boot the kernel which is on the local hard disk? (I have OF-1.0.5)

Other option: if anyone has a powermac or powercomputing logic board for
sale (not too expensive, please!)...

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
p99dreyf@criens.u-psud.fr