On Wed, 18 Dec 1996 Adrian_Roseboom@hud.gov wrote:

>   
>   WARNING: Extreme newbieness ahead
>   
>   I've picked up a combo platter of a 386i w/expansion module (two scsi 
>   slot case w/tape drive) and a diskless 3/50.  The 386i has been brought 
>   back to life running SunOS 4.0.1 and I picked up a dirt cheap 80MB scsi 
>   drive for the 3/50.  I created the tapes on the 386i and then moved the 
>   expansion module onto the 3/50 so I could boot from it.  Booting went 
>   fine, loading the miniroot, sensing the IBM drive, etc.  Eventually I 
>   figured out the disk labeling and set up my partitions.
>   
	Cool - You'll probably want to pick up a copy of the SunOS 4.0.2
	upgrade disks from sun386i.mono.org :) (there's also a useful
	collection of programs compiled up for the sun386i there)

>   do i need to format these partitions after labeling them?  this used to 
>   be an IBM drive with DOS on it.  I wiped out those partitions before but 
>   I can still cat DOS data out of it..  if I need to format, can I do it in 
>   the miniroot?
>   
	No, you can just 'newfs' them. If it is an old drive then you
	probably want to run the sunos format on it to check out any
	bad blocks first - the sun3 sunos boot media is available from the
	sun3 ftp site - check out the link from the NetBSD/sun3 web
	page.

>   basically, the miniroot seems to be reading OK at first.  When I try to 
>   dd the miniroot into the b partition, I get the following error:
>   
>   st0(si0:4:0):no data found, requested size:64(decimal) data=00 00 00
>   0+0 records in
>   0+0 records out
>   
>   I also got this error after trying weof after each file.  Using weof also 
>   gave me short read errors.  this was all using the stock instructions.
>   
>   not knowing much about tape drives, I searched through the list archives 
>   and found out about the ibs obs problems and tried several combinations 
>   with no success.
>   
>   Just curious if it was a tape read problem, I tried to dd the .welcome 
>   file into the b partition and it failed to write there.  Is the previous 
>   error message so cryptic as to actually be a hard drive error?
>   
>   Just FYI, I can't work on the IBM drive on the 386i because it doesn't 
>   like it somehow.  It doesn't sense it at boot time even after it has been 
>   labeled.  The 386i has also stopped responding to the 3/50's tftp 
>   requests so I can't netboot it from there.  I'll probably install NetBSD 
>   on my Win95 box to boot it if that will help. that PC doesn't have SCSI 
>   so I can't modify the drive or access st0 there either.
>   
	Nasty - I wish I could help on this :(
	I regularly netboot my sparc boxen from a NetBSD/i386 server,
	but the sun386i _should_ work ok... Maybe a marginal network
	connection?

	Good luck.

		David/abs david@{mono.org,southern.com,mhm-internet.com}

System Manager: Southern Studios Ltd, PO Box 59, London N22 1AR.
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