On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Dave Guynn wrote:

> Okay, I got the INSTALL_SMALL kernel on  adisk.
> It fritzed again:
> cpu0: Intel 386DX (386-class)
> [
> .
> .
> .
> ]
> root file system type: ffs
> erase ^?, werase ^W, kill ^U, intr ^C
> 
> Any ideas,

Yeah, here's an idea that worked for me (although this is a really big
kludge).

I had a similar experience with an old Gateway 80386sx (16Mhz, 4MB RAM)
that I have. I too got to the "erase ^?, werase ^W, kill ^U, intr ^C" part
and then nothing. To get around this, I actually pulled the drive out of
the PC and put it into another Pentium system. On the Pentium system I
then installed NetBSD and compiled a new stripped down kernel. Once that
was done, I moved the drive back to the 80386sx system. Now I can boot
NetBSD off the disk in the old system without having to use a floppy. 

Even though I am unable to boot off a NetBSD 1.3.x floppy on the old
system, NetBSD 1.3.x is working better -- when I tried to boot this old
system with NetBSD 1.2.1 the machine would always reboot as the kernel
started to identify the different pieces of hardware that were installed. 

Some people from the OpenBSD project tried to help me with this but the
end result of their work was the suggestion that I get more memory and
preferably a faster machine.


Brian

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