On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:

>   1. Both systems have the A1659-66001 video adaptors, which are SGC and
> thus, not supported since no one has written drivers for it.  Is there
> anyone working on drivers?  Is there any information about writing drivers
> for the card?

OpenBSD's hp700 port supports these cards, so you could probably scarf
some info from there.  AFAIK, the real hold-up is finding how to access
the SGC bus on the hp400 machines, since that info would have to be
disassembled from the bootrom.

It'd be cool if you could do this!

>   2. Both systems come with 2 Quantum 425S SCSI drives.

I've had plenty of trouble with these drives and NetBSD.  Not sure where
the problem is, since I've even had troubles on port-sparc which uses the
more robust machine-independent SCSI driver.

> 	sd0: scsi sense class 7, code 0, key 2
> 	sd0: WARNING: I/O error, using old default partitioning
> 	sd0: scsi sense class 7, code 0, key 2
> 	sd0: WARNING: I/O error, using old default partitioning
> 	sd0: scsi sense class 7, code 0, key 2
> 	sd0: scsi sense class 7, code 0, key 2
> 	sd0: WARNING: I/O error, using old default partitioning
> 	no file system for sd0 (dev 0x400)
> 	cannot mount root, error = 79

This stuff just means that it can't find a disklabel on that drive (either
because it's not on the drive or because it's not talking to the drive
properly).  These errors aren't fatal in and of themselves.

> partition for use?  Under linux it's ``mkswap'' but I don't see an
> equivilent for NetBSD.

There's no need to make a swap 'filesystem' under NetBSD.  The 'approved'
method is to add an entry to your /etc/fstab:
/dev/sd1b                       none                    swap    sw

> I did do a ``swapon /dev/sd6b'' which seemed to work
> yet the kernel panic'ed

sd6?  Take a look at your dmesg output, and you'll notice that the sdX
numbers don't correspond directly to the SCSI ID.  They're numbered from
lowest to highest address in sequential order (if you have ID3 and ID6,
they become sd0 and sd1).

>   -spc (Oh, and a quick mention in the Installation file that if the screen
> 	seems to go dead, try hooking a terminal up to the system.  I wasted
> 	several hours over that 8-)

Ouch.  I added an entry to the FAQ.

Good luck,
  -- MW