>> I dug out my old hp300 boxen.  It seems one disk drive has decided
>> to die while on the shelf, and I don't know how long the remaining
>> two drives will last.  Therefore, I wanted to set it up to netboot.

>> Unfortunately, it seems my bootroms are too old (rev A), so I'm
>> looking for ROM images that are netboot-capable.

> Can't help with the BootROM images, but I've had conflicting reports
> of Rev A ROMs working/not working.

Come to think of it, I *must* have netbooted in order to create the
very first install on these machines, because I have no other machines
that could have written HP-IB disks, nor do these machines have any
other disk interface.

I've tried all my machines; none of them appear to be willing to even
try to netboot.  (I don't have rbootd running, but I do have tcpdump
sniffing for anything that doesn't include the sniffer's own MAC
address, which ought to turn up at least the initial boot packet.  And
as far as I can tell the hp300s are sending nothing at all.

One of the machines has a video board that won't play nice with my
monitor (it's a 98544A instead of the 98544Bs the other three have),
but I swapped CPU boards between that and another box and it still
wouldn't even try to netboot.

> In fact, my Rev A 320 did successfully netboot.  Try it before
> getting yourself in trouble (theoretically you'd need to set up the
> netboot server anyways).

Well, yah.

>> I've got four machines.  Unfortunately, it's not clear exactly what
>> models they are.  They all have 68020s with 33.3333MHz crystals.

> Well, that rules out the 350 (25MHz 68020), and according to
> http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/hp300/hardware.html the video and memory
> should give it away:
> 320 - no on-board video, only 16 KB on motherboard
> 330 - no on-board video, 4 MB on motherboard
> 318 - mono video
> 319 - 6 bit color video

None of them have video on the same board as the CPU (video is always a
separate 98544B), which seems to indicate they're 330s; there's no
separate memory board, except possibly the DIO-I ones.

>> The backplanes for these machines have two connectors for each slot,
>> a 96-pin one reminiscent of VME boards and a 48-pin one that looks
>> similar except it's the other sex and is only half the size.
> Those are DIO-II boards.

Noted.

>> The other one is a double-box machine; it has two slots that look
>> identical to the other machines' slots, except that they have only
>> the 96-pin connector, and six slots which can each take two boards
>> (one back-panel slot corresponds to two backplane slots); the slots
>> use card-edge style connectors, a la ISA or Qbus, and are either
>> about 60 or about 120 pins, depending on whether the two sides of
>> the card are different.
> 100 pins, and they're DIO-I boards.

Noted.  What are the deep boards with one 96-pin connector and no
48-pin connector, then?  Is that another flavor of DIO-II, or something
else, or what?

>> I'd prefer to get the latter machine's ROMs upgraded, because it
>> admits to 6 MB of RAM, whereas the others have only 4.
> Probably a 330 with 2 MB of RAM (i.e. 4 512 KB RAM cards).

I'm not sure.  From bottom to top (note that there are two DIO-I slots
in a single back-panel space; the first two slots are 96-pin VME-style
connector, the rest are dual DIO-I slots):

- 98544B: video
- CPU board (98561-66520)
- - 98561-66531: RS-232, sound, HIL, HP-IB
  - 98257-66524 (0000)
- - 98643A (on the panel), 98643-26501 (on the board): AUI Ethernet
  - 98257-66524 (0001)
----Chassis bulkhead----
- - Third-party 3-port serial board (three 8250s)
  - 98257-66524 (0010)
- - 98625A (on the panel), 98625-66501 (on the board): HP-IB
  - 98257-66524 (0011)
- - 98257-66524 (0100)
  - 98257-66524 (0101)
- - empty
  - 98620B (according to sticker on the board)

The four bits in parens on the 98257-66524 lines indicate the settings
of a bank of four rocker switches, with 0 indicating the end nearer the
center of the board being pressed.

I note six 98257-66524 boards and six megs of RAM reported.  I also
note the absence of the 68851 on the CPU card; the other three
machines, the ones with 4M of RAM on the CPU card, have a 68851
prominently visible.  This CPU card has nothing of the sort: just a
68020 and a 68881.  I suspect this of being a 320.

The three nearly-identical machines almost have to be 330s; nothing
else fits.  They definitely are not 318/319s; they are not single-board
(the CPU is not on the same board as the HP-IB, HIL, etc).  I can only
conjecture at the reason one of those CPU cards in the 320 chassis
couldn't see the extra 6 megs of RAM; I would guess this is because of
the missing second connector (the 48-pin one).

> While you're at it, maybe you could take a look at
> basesrc/distrib/hp300 and figure out how to generate a tarball with
> the files that are put into the miniroot image.  This would make
> creating a netboot installation a lot easier.

Unless and until I figure out how to make one of them at least try to
boot off the net, there's little point.

However, I'm certain that at one point, years ago back when I first set
these machines up (NetBSD 1.2 is what's on the disk now), I had much
more elaborate interaction with the monitor.  This means that either
there then was another machine I can't now find, or it's possible to
get into another mode somehow and I just don't know how.  Years-old
fuzzy memory says that to boot from the net I had to specifically ask
it to look at the net by typing something on the keyboard...which would
explain why I couldn't do that now; I don't remember enough details.

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B