> From: Tim Rightnour <root@garbled.net>
>
>
> On 08-Mar-01 Brian Hechinger wrote:
> > so, can i just stick that drive back in my Sun box,
> > mount the root filesystem and copy the alpha kernel to the disk, or is there
> > a problem with Sun mounting alpha UFS?  if so, can i dd cdhdtape to slice c
> > or
> > will that destroy my install?  it would be trivial to reinstall the OS, but
> > i'd like to try the "alternate" method first.
>
> Well.. there are a few possible problems here.
>
> 1) A sun can read an "alpha" UFS, they are both BSD ffses.  The problem is the
> endian of them, thats what the FFS_EI kernel option solves.  If you have that
> option compiled in your kernel on the sparc, than yes.. you can read/write the
> filesystem.  I doubt you have this option however.

Wow, does that really work?  Don't you have to at least drop a sparc
disklabel onto it, do the mount, and then go back to an alpha disklabel by
rewriting the label and alpha bootblocks with cross-compiled utilities on
the sparc? (A second drive, even an crummy old tiny one would really make
this a lot easier, because then you could obviously dd(1) cdhdtape onto it
and then rewrite the labels and stuff from NetBSD/alpha.)

> 2) Asuming that's not the case..or even if it is..  you could dd your cdhdtape
> image to the swap partition of your disk, rather than the whole thing.  Of
> course, this assumes that NetBSD/sparc can read a NetBSD/alpha disklabel.  I'm
> not wholly sure on that.

I a bit confused here, what's the value of having cdhdtape in swap?  The
alpha firmware departs from older practice of understanding disklabels
and booting from specified partitions ... AFAIK it just doesn't do that.
So, cdhdtape has to start at sector 0.

	--Ross