I've just acquired a handful of hp300 hardware and, of course, I'd like
to run NetBSD on it.

The problem is _getting_ NetBSD on it.  The boot ROMs are rev A2, which
presumably is earlier than the Rev C that the INSTALL document says is
needed to load SYS_INST over the net.

However, among the disks is one with a (fairly old, but bootable) HP-UX
installation on it.  There are two other disks that can be used as work
disks - I'm not about to touch the one known-working boot disk now. :-)

The problem is, the install document does not describe any way of
installing on such a setup.  There is a tape drive, but it seems to be
broken - HP-UX seems incapable of writing SYS_INST to it, at any rate.
And besides the above indication, I have no reason to think the boot
ROMs know how to load it from the network.  I tried, first with rbootd
on a NetBSD/sparc machine, then with rbootd not running and instead
simply using tcpdump to see if the hp300 was sending _anything_, which
as far as I can tell it's not.

I imagine that once I get SYS_INST running I'll be OK, but that first
step seems to be a biggie.  I tried using lifcp to copy SYS_INST to
what I presume is the boot area of one of the "scratch" disks (which
already had something called SYS_PBOOT there), but then the ROMs found
neither that nor the SYS_PBOOT they found before.  But I don't know
enough about the hp300 boot sequence to know what's really going on
here.

Anyone got the time, knowledge, and inclination to help me stop
stumbling around in the dark?  I'd sure appreciate it.

I've sent in a subscribe request to port-hp300, but haven't gotten an
ack back from majordomo yet.  So I'd appreciate it if replies could be
sent directly to me, rather than counting on the list to get to me.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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