On Sep 26,  7:49pm, Markus Illenseer wrote:
>  Starting loadbsd with option -b ends up in a requestor for the boot-device.
> It displays the choice between sdxa, fdxa and cdxa. (Isn't 'a' wrong ?)
> (rstxa is missing, too >;-)

  Um, the code shows that it should be printing "fd%d sd%d cd%d" - there
isn't any 'a' there to be printed.

  Exactly how would you get a root file system on a tape drive and be able
to do random accesses from it :-)

>  My question: is cdxa what i think it is? CD-ROM ? 

  Yes.

> What should the CD contain, whoich flag must be set to make NetBSD boot
> from a CD? Does this work - /dev/* cannot be written on CD, the device-nodes
> are missing in ISO-9660 Level 2 (w/ or w/o RR)?

  I would guess that the CD would have to be written with a ffs file system
and a partition table that includes the 'a' partition - unless there is
some other code somewhere that knows enough to mount the root with the
cd9660 filesystem.  I don't remember seeing that anywhere.  Anyway, I don't
think an ffs formatted CD would work anyway - the kernel won't work if
the block size isn't 512 bytes.  If the CD could do 512 byte blocks (I
think some drives are capable of working in 512 byte blocks - I assume
the drive must be doing the buffering & deblocking) and were written with
a ffs partition (and in the Amiga's case, the RDB would also have to be
present to provide the partition information), it might work.

Michael

-- 
Michael L. Hitch			INTERNET:  osymh@montana.edu
Computer Consultant
Office of Systems and Computing Services
Montana State University	Bozeman, MT	USA