On Sat 2000-04-15 (16:48), Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 14, 2000 at 10:27:56AM +0200, David Sieborger wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm installing NetBSD 1.4.2 on a SPARCclassic, which used to run Red
> > Hat Linux.  I've created a disklabel, and successfully run the
> > install.sh script from a diskless boot.  However, when I try to boot
> 
> Make sure that your partitions start and end on cylinder boundary.
> The sparc firmware won't work properly if this is not the case
> (and of course the boot loader uses prom's routines to read the disk).

Hi,

I have discovered my error.  I had created the / partition with a
newfs -b 4096 (as I've done before on disk-starved FreeBSD 
machines).  As soon as I recreated sd0a with 8192-byte blocks, 
installboot and bootxx were quite happy.

Whether this is a bug in installboot, or, as Manuel suggests, an
issue to do with the OpenBoot firmware, I don't know.

Anyway, the machine is now happily running NetBSD!  Thank you to
those who replied to my query.


David Sieborger
drs@rucus.ru.ac.za