Hi,

this is sort of a late reply, but better late than never.  When
we recently replaced our broken root disk in our hp425 we had to
net-boot it as well, and stumbled upon exactly the problems you
saw -- the SYS_NBOOT or the SYS_INST programs were transferred to
the HP system Just Fine, but when these programs actually tried
to use the network to fetch stuff, they failed at varying stages
in the process.

The fix in our case turned out to be to set up a small ethernet
connecting *only* the boot server and the HP system.  In this
case the installation went OK, and we were able to go back to
normal operation booting from local disk.

We suspect that the standalone device drivers for the AMD Lance
ethernet chip are at fault, and that they can't handle sitting on
a moderately (?) busy ethernet.

I see recently some other folks have reported problems net-
booting Sun3 systems, and it wouldn't surprise me at all that
those problems have the same root as the one you reported on, if
that's of any consolation...

For reference (and since this is a while ago), I include the
body of your message below.

Regards,

- Havard

------------------------------

> Hello, as you may remember, I am trying to get my hp340 to boot off a
> scsi disk, prepared by the install program.  It was suggested that the
> disk does not have a disklabel and boot sectors on it.  This, while
> unlikely, seems plausible (the install program installs bootblocks,
> doesnt it?  maybe space needs to be left at the start of the disk that
> I didnt leave?)
> 
> Anyway, I am trying to netboot the beast to check it all out, have the
> whole thing set up, i believe correctly, but I get an error (surprise
> surprise, another error, seems I never get a way from them..)
> 
> here it is
> 
> >> NetBSD NETWORK BOOT HP9000/340 CPU
> >> $NetBSD: netboot.c,v 1.10 1995/10/04 07:24:32 thorpej Exp $
> >> Enter "reset" to reset system.
> Boot: [netbsd][-s][-a][-d] :- -s
> boot: client IP address: 128.136.18.134
> boot: client name: val.the.org
> root addr=128.136.18.132 path=/usr/export/val/root
> le(0,0,0,0): Unknown error: code -1
> boot: Unknown error: code -1
> Boot: [onetbsd][-s][-a][-d] :-
> boot: client IP address: 128.136.18.134
> boot: client name: val.the.org
> root addr=128.136.18.132 path=/usr/export/val/root
> le(0,0,0,0): Unknown error: code -1
> boot: Unknown error: code -1
> 
> Any ideas? Could it be that the root directory (/usr/export/val/root)
> is not configured correctly.  Its a link, could that matter?  Its
> contents are base11.tar.gz and etc11.tar.gz fully decompressed, and
> the kernel from the install directory.  Is there more needed?
> 
> Thanks for any help,
> 
> Bart Niswonger