I've been trying to get NetBSD installed on a pmax 5000/200 with cfb, and have
run into a lot of trouble, some of which is undoubtedly due to my lack of
understanding how to deal with a miniroot, but other problems seem to be
things just plain not working the way I've been told they're supposed to.

I picked up a miniroot and bootblocks from Jonathan's snapshot area over on
gregorio.stanford.edu:/pub/NetBSD/pmax/ss-95.09.12/ directory and
disklabel from ftp.netbsd.org:/pub/NetBSD/arch/pmax/tools (and built it on the
machine, which is running Ultrix 4.2A).  So far so good.

Jonathan has told me that I should be making a disklabel with a zero offset on
the 'a' partition, but whenever I do that, I get an error (from the prom
monitor, version info KN02-AA V5.3t) trying to boot from the disk.  

(If I try and write the miniroot with an seek=16, the prom can't find netbsd
[bootblocks getting clobbered?] if I offset it to put it on the 'b' or 'd'
partition (and of course change my boot from "5/rz3/netbsd" to "5/rz3P/netbsd"
where P is 'b' or 'd' as appropriate), I get the miniroot booted to prompt for
a root device, but a panic happens when I tell it to use rz3,

Right now I have the machine configured as follows:

rz2 - Ultrix boot disk, pretty full, only ~200M disk.
rz3 - NetBSD disk, labeled as follows:

# /dev/rrz3c:
type: SCSI
disk: Maxtor 8760-S
label: 
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 53
tracks/cylinder: 15
sectors/cylinder: 795
cylinders: 1626
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0		# milliseconds
track-to-track seek: 0	# milliseconds
drivedata: 0 

4 partitions:
#        size   offset    fstype   [fsize bsize   cpg]
  a:    65968       16    4.2BSD     1024  8192    16 	# (Cyl.    0*- 82*)
  b:    98580    65985      swap                    	# (Cyl.   83 - 206)
  c:  1292670        0    unused     1024  8192       	# (Cyl.    0 - 1625)
  d:  1128105   164565    unused     1024  8192       	# (Cyl.  207 - 1625)

rz4 - ~450M Ultrix disk, with a NetBSD / file tree that was created from the 
      files found in gregorio.stanford.edu:/pub/NetBSD/pmax/binary-a.out
      (and the gennetbsd and netbsd binaries from the same snapshot directory
       as the miniroot)

My plan (which may be naive) was to boot up the miniroot, newfs the 'a' and
'd' partitions on the netbsd disk, mount each in turn on a temporary nount
point, mount the ultrix rz4 disk on a temporary mount point, and then cp -R 
the appropriate files (everything but rz4:/usr to the 'a' partition, and 
rz4:/usr to the 'd' partition), edit the fstab on the 'a' partition, and
reboot from the 'a' partion.

When I boot the miniroot, it seems to boot correctly, asking me for a root
device, to which I answer rz3, and it then mumbles about a few things that
look normal, and prints the line:

Jan  3 22:23:54 init:/etc/spwd.db: no such file or directory

and then prompts be for a path to a shell, or hit return for sh.

So I hit return, and get a '#' prompt.

The following ensues:

# ls
<segv mumbles>
# pwd
pwd: cannot exec /bin/pwd
# cd /
# pwd
/
# ls
<segv mumbles>
# mount /dev/rz4c /a
(mumbles here about there not being a label, and it being mounted read-only
because it's an ultrix file system. fine.)
# cd /a
# pwd
/a
# ls
<segv mumbles>
# cd bin (I know there's a ./bin directory on that disk)
<no such file or directory mumbles>

and so on.

When I newfs /dev/rrz3a, it seems to work.
When I newfs /dev/rrz3d, I get mumbles about a crosslink somewhere.

::sigh::

Ocasionally, I do get directory listings with ls, but mostly just the segv
mumbles.

If anyone has the time and inclination to mentor me though this, I would be
extremely grateful.

Thanks,
Mike