Re: Data Access Exception when trying to Boot installed NetBSD of hard drive

[Erik Fair <fair%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Oct 12, 2014, at 23:07 , John Nemeth <jnemeth%cue.bc.ca@localhost> wrote:

>     Even my Ultra 2, which is much newer then the original poster's
> system requires the kernel to be within the first 4GB.

The 32-bit SPARCs had a tighter restriction than the 64-bit UltraSPARCs like the Ultra 2 as I recall: within the first 1 or 2 GB; there's an extended SCSI CCB required when the block number gets above one of those (I forget which). Hence the practice of a "small" root partition at the beginning of a system boot disk (of say 64 or 128 MB) to guarantee that a kernel could never be "out of range" for the boot firmware.

That practice also makes FFSv2 (or anything else you like, e.g. LFS, ext2) available for every other filesystem mounted, since only the booting FS has to be FFSv1.

Other recommendation: I've had troubles with booting from "unclean" disks where an old NetBSD or some other OS had been installed, so I'd zero the first megabyte of disk before partitioning+disklabel, newfs, etc., e.g.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rsd0c bs=1m count=1

Be careful specifying that disk drive device file if you do it on another NetBSD system where you're prepping the disk for installation.

	Erik <fair%netbsd.org@localhost>