> I have solved the power supply problem I had (hacked it out and
> tossed it) repaced it with a used supply from a cool surplus place in
> Mountainview.  The "Boot Prom Selftest" comes up and all tests
> passed.

Excellent.  You quite likely have working hardware now.  (Keep that fan
grille clean - open it up and vacuum out the dust at least yearly, more
if your environment is dusty.)

> Now it's time for NetBSD.  I do not have any Sun Opsys so a bare
> system install will have to be made some how.  I have down loaded the
> NetBSD to a 586 Dos system, can I partition the SCSI drive with the
> 586?

Probably.  But then you'll have trouble getting anything useful onto
it.  (Unless the sun3 install kit includes a miniroot image to dd into
the swap area; it's been quite a while since I looked at it.)

I have a little NetBSD program, sunlabel, that allows you to manipulate
Sun-style disk labels.  You could use the program on a plain file to
generate the label, then if you can coax the DOS box into writing the
result to the first sector of the disk, it should be recognized by the
PROMs.  Then you just need to dump the miniroot image into the correct
place on the disk (you may want to do this first, because it may
involve writing some sort of partition info to the first sector, which
would thus be destroyed by the Sun disklabel).

> If not, could I use a SCO Unix machine (running on another 586) to
> write the system to the disk?

Almost certainly.

All you need to do is to get the disk label onto the first sector and
the miniroot into the space the disk label thinks is the swap partition
(normally partition b - it doesn't _have_ to be, but you will be making
a whole lot of unnecessary trouble for yourself if you try to swap
anywhere else).

If the SCO machine is capable of it, I would suggest using its
partitioning scheme to set up a partition on the disk where you want
swap to be, then copy the miniroot image there.  Then write the
disklabel generated with sunlabel to the first sector of the disk
(which may destroy the SCO label, but that's OK).  You should then have
a disk that boots the miniroot on your Sun-3.

If not, you can construct a disk image by concatenating the disk label,
a whole lot of NULs, and the miniroot image, and dumping that onto the
disk.  I don't know thing one about SCO's OS, so I have no idea how
easy or hard this might be.

You may be able to build sunlabel on the SCO machine; if not, you can
run it on another NetBSD machine (I _think_ it should work even on a
little-endian machine, but all the machines I've been able to test it
on have been big-endian 32-bit).

sunlabel is currently available only by mail from me - I still don't
have my home machines' anonymous ftp area properly set back up yet.
Drop me a line if you want it.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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