Dear NetBSD-Pmaxers,

   I had earlier attempted to load NetBSD-Pmax on a DecStation-3100 and
failed after copying the miniroot and attempting to boot.  I gave it another
try today with Feb 22 Arne's installation proceedure.

   First I noticed I had missed typed the sectors/cylinder in the disklabel
file (had 588 should have had 558).  I corrected that.  
 My first attempt failed with the message:
 ?44C prtn rderr
 open (rz(0,0,0)netbsd) failed: 11
 can't boot rz(0,0,0)netbsd

 I was quite disapointed because I had hoped the mistake I had caught by
carefully inspecting the output after writing and then reading the disklabel
would have solved my sticking point.

  I next re-did things and after writing out the swapped label ran chpt 
to see that it stilled squaked about the no partition found in superblock.

  I did another attempt to boot NetBSD and to my suprize (and joy) it came
up!

  I tried to retrace my steps.  I had two directories with the same disklabel
files and found that the first one I tried had the swapped in the order in
the directions (d:, b:, c: and a:) while the second swapped file had the
regular order (a:, b:, c: and d:).  After writing out the first swapped
disklabel file and attempting to boot it came up just as it had with the
second swapped file.  I can not figure out what I had done differently
which would have caused the booting sequence to fail.

  I'm not sure what I was doing wrong but Arny's install directions 
worked for me.

  I have a few comments on them:
A) Last part of step 2 - "inspect the output carefully" -- should be in BOLD
B) When booting (step 6) init squaks about a couple of things which 
   should be documented.
C) Step 9 - miniroot should have halt and reboot - I agree and ftp
D) Step 10 - should refer to step 6 relative to booting NetBSD.
E) Step 12 - I had problems doing rcp complaining about an unknown id of 0.
   My guess is that security on that machine is high enough to not allow
   rcp to work as root.  I was able to mount a disk via NFS (without the
   -P flag) and copy the files.  It would be nice to have ftp available
   as well as NFS and rcp to get the files over.

   At any rate with the problems I had had and others had had installing
NetBSD on PMAX I thought it would good to have a success story.
   Thanks so much to Jonathan and Arne!

Now if we just had shared libraries....
johnh...