After being gone a few weeks, I am trying to get "current".
The following recaps the chain of events.  I would be very
grateful if someone could help me unravel this.

I know!  What I did was dumb.  Feel free to remind me of that.

Compiled and installed libraries.
Compiled kernel. (Not yet installed)
Compiled everything.
Copied /bin, /sbin to /usr/old.root.bin, and /usr/old.root.sbin.
Copied /usr/bin, /usr/sbin to /usr/old.usr.bin and /usr/old.usr.sbin.
(obviously counting on being able to mount /usr...)
Moved kernel to /netbsd.old, and copied new kernel to /.
Set PATH to include the above copied dirs before $PATH.
Ran 'make install' in /usr/src/bin without problem.
Ran 'make install' in /usr/src/sbin.

  (Here's the beginning of problems)
'make install' errored out when the install tried to run
./strip on /usr/sbin/strip.  Every attempt to run 'make install'
after that gave "cannot map ld.so".  After discovering that 
/usr/libexec/ld.so no longer existed, I copied the new ld.so into
/usr/libexec. (I know, wrong!) After doing so, attempting to run
almost anything gave "libc.so.9.0 invalid arg", or something like that.
Seeing that most of /bin, and /sbin had successfully installed, I
decided to boot the new kernel and see, if nothing else, if I could
restore my backed up binaries.

Booting from the new kernel panics at about the time when changing to 
root device sd0a.
(At this point, I was getting a bit shocky, so the chain of events is
 1.stupid, and 2.unclear.)

Rebooted from the new kernel in single user mode.
Attempted to run fsck on /usr part. with many "can't read block XX"
errors.  Attempted to mount it on /usr, and got "not supported by device"
error.  ??

Rebooted from floppy.
Mounted /dev/sd0a on /mnt.
Attempted to run new version of fsck on /usr partition.
Got many "can't read block XX" errors, so I terminated fsck.

Somewhere in this process, the boot blocks got nuked "NO ROM BASIC".
The disklabel is still intact though.
'mount_ufs' disappeared.
Can't make boot disk writeable due to missing /etc/fstab on floppy.

HELP!

My old kernel on disk is dated 4-13.  It is the first required jump
that Chris indicated would be necessary to follow the changes.

It seems like it would be easiest to move forward at this point.
Are there new boot floppies with the latest kernel somewhere? (w/fsck)
Any suggestions as to what I should do to save /usr?
Any other help would be greatly appreciated.

I'll accept collect phone calls from anyone in the US having the
inclination to see if I sound as stupid as I apparently am.  :-)
402-488-8163

-Randy Terbush
randy@ugn.unomaha.edu

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