I can't help much with the 5k/125 not booting, other than
to offer a dd image off a disk on a 5k/240 that _does_ boot, and
see if that gets any further....


>A random comment about the process, since i'm writing this mail:
>
>nit'd be sort of nice if the miniroot image was filled with zeros
>before being newfs.  some 'random data' from a disk block in the first
>(always-empty) 8k of the file system ... can look confusing.


The miniroots were put together using the VND driver.  For
reasons I don't understand at _all_,  doing a newfs on a filesystem
under a VND driver, on a pmax, appears to reserve space for
bootblocks.  (this is, as far as I can tell, the source of the
"extra" 16 sectors that has confused many would-be installers.)

*However*, and this is the point, I can't find any way to write
a bootblock (or disklabel) to those 16 sectors.  Is this deliberate
or a bug?  If it's deliberate, why are things set up that way?

thanks for any advice,
--Jonathan