On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Chris Rupnik wrote:

> Hi,
>  That is not quite my user experience.
>
> If you dd the image to the drive you want to install on, upon bootup
> disklabel/kernel will incorrectly detect the drive as a 2 mb drive.  You
> have to dd some zeroes to the drive, and then reboot, then the image is
> gone, etc etc.
>
> So, what i had to do was use the diskettes to install. After that, the ftp
> and other sysinst processes worked fine.
>
>  Chris
>

	Thats right I forgot about disklabel not wanting to write over a
valid label (though it probably should on an install), but I always use a
different drive to install now. Floppies aren't an option on PMAX (well I
suppose one of those rare SCSI floppies could be used...)

	Also sysinst had some other bugs on Alpha (like bombing out with a
disk full error and messing up the ifconfig.le0 file with a media
statement that doesnt work...) Not sure if the ethernet media bug is in
PMAX also because I sidestepped it during the installation by hitting
return when the sysinst program asked for ethernet media type...


>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Peter C. Wallace" <pcw@mesanet.com>
> To: <port-pmax@netbsd.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2001 1:23 PM
> Subject: Re: Mop Boot for 5000/240
>
>
> > On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Toru Nishimura wrote:
> >
> > > > My Decstation 5000/240 has one of the busted proms that can
> > > > not boot using tftp.
> > >
> > > Isn't it an option for you to try dd'ing raw filesystem image to your
> > > disk for initial bootstrap?  The file is found in pmax distribution as;
> > >
> > > installation/diskimage/diskimage.gz
> > >
> > > Tohru Nishimura
> > >
> >
> > Thats what I do, works like a charm. First unzip the file, then dd
> > it onto any small SCSI drive (the unzipped install image is only 2M)  You
> > can dd the image to actual drive you are going to use but if anything goes
> > wrong during the install, you may have to re-do the diskimage dd, so I
> > normally just use a small helper drive.
> >
> > I just installed 1.5 onto a Maxine (and an DEC 3000/300) this way.
> > I have a small SCSI drive (RZ24) in an external case just for this use.
> > Once sysinst is running I usually use ftp to a local machine to complete
> > the install. I have done netboot installs, but if you have a helper
> > machine with a SCSI interface, the diskimage system is simpler (IMHO)
> >
> >
> >
> > Peter Wallace
> >
> >
> >
>
>

Peter Wallace
Mesa Electronics