> >What is in ``disklabel''?  If I knew what was wanted or had one from
> >a 2100/3100 box (RZ24 drive or RZ23 drive), then I could maybe get
> >that onto the drive after the sun had formatted it and written the
> >diskimage to the a partition.
> 
> For our purposes, there are two vital things.
> 
> The first is the bootblock code which lives int he first ~8k of the
> disk. the second is the BSD disklabel which tells a BSD system how to
> crave up the disk into BSD partitions.  
> 
> IIRC, Sun-3s dont use BSD disklabels; they predate the ~4.3-Reno
> addition of on-disk BSD labels.

Sunos 4.1.1 writes some kind of label, but the fs is marked 4.2.
I am not sure exactly what it writes.

> Trying to set up pmax labels or bootcode on a Sun of any kind, using
> Sun disklabel or format utilities, isnt going work: the PROM-specific
> offsets will be different.
> 
> The easiest way is to do a bit-for-bit copy of an exisiting pmax label
> and bootcode. That's why you need to copy the "diskimage" to the _raw_
> partition of the C drive: to bypass any labelling on the Sun box.
> 
> Just checking, but you did uncompress the diskimage before dd'ing it
> to /dev/rsd?c, right?

Yes, uncompressed it, then did a dd to the raw rsc?c partition.

I will try it on one of my other machines, and see if I can get it
to work.  I am obviously not doing something quite right, but I am
still perplexed as to exactly what.

> >It never got this far.  After I booted it and hit <CR> it came
> >back after about 2-3 seconds of spinning up the disk to the monitor.
> 
> You mean you didn't get to the ">>" prompt?  Are you sure you terminated the
> SCSI bus properly?

Drives are DEC drives, unterminated, and the cable ends in the DECstaton
terminator dongle on the back panel of the drive tray.

> BTW, the suggestion to netboot is only for installation purposes.  the
> 1.3 install tools are set up so that you can boot diskless, and then
> use the diskless-boot from diskimage.tgz to install to a local disk.
> Once you've done that, you no longer need to have a netboot-host-host
> up to serve for your pmax.

I will try the netboot from a pc box with NetBSD-1.3.3 loaded, and
see if I can make that work.  If I can get a dumb dos box up with a
scsi controller I will also try rawriting it to the drive, and see
if I can make that work.

Thanks

Bob Keys