On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, NetBSD Bob wrote:

> > 	Maybe something strange with the disklabel?
> > 	Can you switch the ss1 drive into the ipx and see if it behaves
> > 	the same as a test?
> 
> What about the other way around?  Let the IPX do a vanilla install,
> then move the HD over to the SS1?   The IPX install went fine,
> yesterday.  I have done that with VAXen before, and it seems
> to do fine.
> 
	I was hoping by preforming exactly the same set of actions on
	the IPX, with the disk configuration from the SS1, that you could
	confirm for certain whether the problem was with the SS1 or the
	disk configuration - I'd like to try to identify the problem and
	find a fix rather than a workaround :)

> That is how I inadvertently got OpenBSD up on a sun4/110 vme crate.
> I swapped the drive over, and was about to set it up for sunos,
> and the silly thing booted and ran OpenBSD fine.  Alas, when
> I tried that with NetBSD, it was a nogo.  Now that the scsi
> drivers are better on the sun4 hardware, I should retry that.
> 
	Please do! If you find you're still having problems and have the
	time it would be excellent if you could checkout variuos versions
	via anoncvs to try to track down when problems were introduced...

> It could also have something to do with the drive setups.
> I am using 4 HDS on the SS1, sd0/1/2/3, with boot on sd0,
> as opposed to the usual sun sd3.  The IPX only has 1 drive.
> Are there any gotchas there that might give problems?
> That did not seem to be the case.  What happened was that
> NetBSD did not do the disklabel, but just aborted to prom,
> where it should have written the label to the disk drive.
> On rebooting, it came back up in OpenBSD.  Should I do
> a lowlevel on a vax to freshen up the drive before attempting
> the NetBSD install?  I would not expect that to be important.
> But, sometimes strange things get written to disks that make
> swapping OS's problematic.

	My guess is that it is disk/disklabel related. Could you
	disconnect some of the drives from the SS1 and see if you
	still see it? Confirm which drive IDs match to which sd numbers
	on the sparc fom the boot messages.

		David/absolute