> Hmmm. In my experience SunOS is better than NetBSD at dealing with
> flakey/misconfigured hardware/cables/etc.

I would agree.  I default to sunos if NetBSD won't come up.  Of late,
the 1.4.2 NetBSD has been running relatively well on one of my 3/260s.
If I have scsi drives, I try NetBSD first.  If I am running esdi
drives, I stick to sunos.

> > Drives on old suns are finicky.  I find quantums do well, but
> > some others don't.  Mine currently sport sun0669 drives (Maxtors
> > if memory is correct).
> 
> I've got a Quantum Lightning half-gig that won't boot. Interestingly,
> the Sun 669 drive, which is larger, will boot. I even made sure to 
> toggle SCSI parity, and the Quantum won't boot either way.

I have several Quantum 270 and 540 things (LPS?) that seem to work
OK.  I found a stash of 0669 drives, and they seem to do fine (since
they are suns).

> > Are you sure your tape drive is actually reading sunos correctly?
> > I have very bad problems with the rubber drive wheels decomposing
> > on almost all my 60mb tape transports (Wangtek and Archive).
> 
> Wow, that's a shame.

Yeah, it is driving me nutso.  I have 8 60mb transports, and only 1
still runs, although I did corner a couple of spare drive wheels
from folks on the net.  At the rate mine are decomposing, there won't
be a way to load a 60mb boot tape in a few more years.  I gotta find
a workable replacement.....  I use the DC-xxxx 1/4 inch cartridges
heavily, still, but with all my drives going south, I am having to
write to CD for backup and redundancy.  S L O W.....

Bob