Howdy all,

Well, thanks to all the advice I got yesterday, I stayed up all night and
managed to get NetBSD running on my StarMax 5000/250.  It even boots
automatically with its NetBSD partition.  Things aren't quite right yet,
though.

First and most important, I can't seem to run it off the IDE drive.  I've
got an old, slow, creaky SCSI drive I'm running it on.

I started by installing base, man, and etc on each drive.  Both booted
fine.  I set up ifconfig.xxx files for each of my two interfaces.  Here's
where they diverge.

The SCSI installation works fine at this point.  The IDE intallation begins
hanging at apparently random points during the boot process, at any stage
after setting up the default gateway and before providing a login prompt.

The IDE installation works fine if I set up _one_ ifconfig.xxx file and
reboot -- doesn't matter which card, either.  As soon as I set up a second
one and reboot, the hangs begin, and they won't go away even if I remove
the ifconfig files.

The only difference between the two installations is Makoto's no-wdc1
kernel.  I'm thinking maybe this is because I installed 1.4, and this
kernel is too new.  Is that a reasonable possibility?

If so, I can build a 1.4 kernel that removes wdc1, but I'm not sure what I
need to comment out to do that.  Can anybody help?  If that _doesn't_ sound
like my problem, are there any other suggestions?

Second question is trivial in comparison -- it seems I need to use a serial
console to access open firmware to control booting, but is it necessary to
use a serial console for system operation in general, or will it kick in
the on-board video display at some point?

And finally, a couple notes.  First, I had to unplug my internal SCSI Zip
drive before it'd boot.  Second, although I entered a DNS number in sysinst
(I tested the number, I'm sure it's good), I had to enter ftp.netbsd.org's
IP address before sysinst could find the server.

Thanks again to everyone for your help.  I really appreciate it.

-Bill


The only difference between the two


Makoto


--
 William R. Dickson -- Consuming the Earth's limited resources since 1968
 wrd@awenet.com   < >   http://www.awenet.com/~wrd/   < >   ICQ: 14117523

     I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.  I want
     to achieve it through not dying.
                                             -Woody Allen