On Mon, 1 Mar 1999 rdkeys@unity.ncsu.edu wrote:

> I have this ancient sparc dinosaur (old vme 12 slot crate with an early
> sparc cpu in it).  My sunos tapes are full of hard errors, so I thought
> I would try loading up netbsd.  I used the dead sunos tape to boot and
> load the miniroot onto swap, and then booted of that fine.  Alas, after
> coming up, the netbsd 1.3.3 sparc would not read anything I put into
> the mt02 archive tape drive.  Interestingly, I pulled the CPU, and put
> in a sun 3/160 cpu, and loaded up netbsd, and it worked fine.
> 
> Anyone know why the sparc suite will not read the tape, yet the sun3
> suite does fine, on the same hardware?  I hope my sparc is not too
> early for netbsd......(:+{{.....
> 
	It should be supported by NetBSD - my guess is you have a
	sun4/260?

> Anyone know of a set of tape building scripts for building a sparc
> tape boot set, like on the sun3?  I cobbled some together, but they
> did not seem to be exactly what was needed.  Surely someone has done
> this kind of thing or the early sparcs?
> 
	Possibly not - most people seem to have access to a network
	interface and netboot their suns. If you get anything working
	then please pass it back to be added to the tree :)

	Do you have any other external SCSI tape drives on which you
	could test? It _might_ just be a problem with that type of drive.

	I back up my sparc via DAT, so tapes definitely work to some
	extent :)

		David/absolute

          -=-  "Give me one last video, just dressed in black"  -=-