Hello,

   dM> No, it almost certainly wants the PROM path, something
     > like /iommu@f,e0000000/sbus@f,e0001000/espdma@f,400000
     > /esp@f,800000/sd@0,0 (this is the actual PROM path for
     > the root disk (not a CDROM) on one of my machines). If
     > you watch the messages produced by the ROMs before the
     > NetBSD bootloader starts, you probably will see a path
     > of that general style among them - that's probably
     > what you need. (It will likely end with something like
     > "sd@6,0" for a CDROM at ID 6.)

I didn't spot anything like that at boot time, and wasn't
able to make that format work for me.  Happily I was able to
boot from a diskette and launch the rest of the installation
from the CD-ROM.

[Interesting & helpful stuff included from SILO thread]

   dM> When you tell the machine to boot (perhaps
     > implicitly), you must tell it which partition to boot
     > from (though this is often defaulted). The ROM code in
     > the machine reads the first sector of the disk.  This
     > is the pack's label, and in particular it contains a
     > partition table.

Is the label's format specific to Sun firmware, or is it a
part of BSD or Unix common heritage? I ask in part because I
am wondering about interoperability of data disks (such as a
Zip disk that I labelled yesterday) between various ports
(at present I'm running NetBSD-1.6.2/sparc and /i386).  How
many partitions can I define in a /sparc disklabel?

   dM> The ROM code then reads sectors 1 through 15 of the
     > partition you're booting from (skipping sector 0,
     > presumably in case the partition begins at offset 0,
     > since in that case sector 0 is the label sector).  The
     > 7½K of data read from the disk is dumped into memory
     > and called.

Are the first 16 sectors of every partition reserved or just
those partitions that are bootable?

- Andy Ball.