I have a bunch of (i386) systems here that have been running BSDi 2.1
(and windows, dual boot), and it is time to upgrade the BSDi part of
that (none the least because that system likes to continually believe
that the date is now 1932 (2^31 seconds before now)).

However, they're old enough that their bios can't boot from cdrom.
They've also been upgraded from boring old floppies to LS120s, and
the techs that did that don't want to have to do it again (or not to
all of them anyway - apparently it is not at all an easy job in the
particular (slimline desktop) cases that these thing slive in).
Needless to say that the bosi doesn't support LS120s either.

If they're able to netboot, I haven't been able to figure out how.

So, given that both windows and BSDi still work on these systems
I thought I could try dosboot, and have it boot the netbsd install
kernel (the same thing that is normally booted from floppies).

I can build dosboot just fine (from sources surrent of a couple of
weeks ago - 1.4U) and it runs seemingly properly.   It even seems
to find and load the netbsd install kernel (which along with dosboot
I have installed in the windows filesystem).   To get that far I
boot windows into "command prompt only" mode (F8 then "6" when
windows'95 boots).  Then run dosboot from the C:> prompt.

The normal kind of boot messages (size of text etc) all appear, then
when the kernel would normally start running, the screen just clears
and the whole system reboots (no autconfig messages, no NetBSD version
processor type, ram size,...)

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I might have missed?  Or does
dosboot no longer work?

The kernel I'm attempting to boot is the netbsd.ram that would normally
be gzip'd and stuck in a boot.fs file (if it would fit - which it
doesn't any more) - or somehow converted into a two floppy set.

Alternatively, any suggestions for hardware modification free methods of
getting these systems upgraded (ie: NetBSD installed) would be appreciated.
Almost anything will do - I have tried the Sun trick (copy boot image into
swap space and boot that), but I can't get the BSDi boot blocks to
read that successfully.   I can simply sacrifice the Windows partition
completely if zapping something onto it is likely to help - I just
need to be able to do it all under BSDi.   I'd prefer not to destroy the
BSDi partition until it seems likely that a NetBSD install is going
to work (I can replace windows trivially - we do that on all of these
systems every night anyway...)

kre