Hi, all.

I'm trying to install NetBSD-current (using snap-970901) on a machine, and
I'm having no luck. I've actually tried three different motherboards with
no success. The items that remain unchanged between motherboards include:

* Generic "multi-controller" that drives a 201 meg Seagate st1239a
IDE-looking hard drive, a 1.44 meg 3.5" floppy, and (presumably) a serial
port. Hm... Looks like there's a game port on there as well. (I don't see a
brand name anywhere on the thing.)

* TAXAN "printer/non-flicker mono/graphic" board, which is being used to
drive an old green monochrome display.

* Generic keyboard.

* Generic power supply.

* Some generic three-chip 30-pin (parity) one-meg SIMMs.

Here are descriptions of the three motherboards:

1) Generic AMD/386sx/sxl-33 board, four SIMM slots... Um... AMI BIOS. Since
there are only four SIMM slots, I only had four megs in the machine during
my attempts at booting.

2) Reasonable-looking Intel i486sx/25 motherboard, also with AMI BIOS,
eight SIMM slots, and consequently eight megs of RAM. Cache slots, but no
chips in them.

3) A pretty nice 486DX2/66 motherboard, with AMI BIOs, a bit of cache, etc.
This one can use all eight SIMMs as well.

I downloaded the entire snap-970901 distribution onto my Mac, and, on the
Intel machine, made a boot floppy with the rawrite program. (I don't
remember which motherboard was in when I made the boot floppy...) I then
proceded to boot... With the 386 and the 486DX2/66, I get to where the
booter figures out that it can't find an uncompressed kernel, so it starts
loading the compressed kernel from the boot floppy. On the line where the
beastie figures out where the kernel is, or whatever those numbers
represent, things seem to go smoothly. But then, once the kernel has
presumably been loaded, the machine reboots where I would have expected the
kernel to kick in and start examining hardware. The cursor drops down just
below the line with the numbers, and that's it.

The only difference with the 486/25 is that instead of a reboot, the
machine simply hangs, requiring a bit of power button manipulation. :)

Does anyone have any idea what might be wrong? I have no good access to
hardware other than what I've got now, most of which I'm borrowing from a
friend. All three motherboards boot DOS from the hard drive correctly, but
none of them are happy with NetBSD, which seems odd. I've made three
different boot floppies, and they all act identically. I made sure (as far
down the chain as I could!) that the checksums for the disk images (and
their archives) were correct.

I'm essentially a Mac person, so I don't know if there's something obvious
that I've missed here. I'd very much like to get the DX2/66 running NetBSD,
though. Right now, I have a Mac SE/30 (16mHz 68030, eight megs of RAM,
medium disk space) running NetBSD-current, and while it's pretty cool, I'd
like some more speed. For example, since there's no serial DMA on the Mac,
the CPU has to snap to attention to handle everything coming and going
through the serial ports. And since I don't have ethernet anywhere, the
fact that I'm running a slow CPU and handling multiple inbound and outbound
TCP and UUCP connections sort of makes me want snappier response times. :P

In detail: One serial port (of two) runs SLiRP (in CSLIP mode) constantly
between my NetBSD machine and my Mac. My Mac runs a terminal server program
so that a LocalTalk network can access the NetBSD box. On the other serial
port, I do UUCP connections sometimes, and PPP connections sometimes. I
think the 486DX2/66 would run this setup a bit more smoothly.

Thanks in advance for the help. And please tune your responses to someone
who isn't really all that knowledgeable regarding Intel hardware! :)

PS: For variety, I downloaded inst121.fs and made a floppy from it.
However, when I try to boot with it, I'm told that the floppy can't boot...
Evidently there's nothing in the boot block, or something. Also, unlike the
boot12g floppies, the inst121 floppy shows up when I change drives to A:
from DOS. A directory listing reveals no files, however. I haven't tried
the older 1.2 boot floppy yet, but I'd really like to run -current anyway,
because that's what my Mac is running.

Again, thanks in advance... (And apologies right now for the obscene length
of this message! In my defence, however, I didn't want to waste bandwidth
by leaving out ANY possibly-relevant details. Did I succeed? :P )

--
        Mason Loring Bliss    /\    mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us
     www.webtrek.com/mason   /()\   awake ? sleep() : dream();
<barbaric>YAWP!</barbaric>  /    \  Squeak to me of love!