On Wed, 3 Sep 1997 18:05:34 +22324924 (EDT)  "H. Jared Agnew" wrote:

>   Has anyone had a problem with diskless booting where the end result is this.
> 
>  you type
>    boot 3/tftp
> 
>  machines talk and the size of the kernel comes up on the pmax however after
>  loading for a while (looks like it does with the old kernel when i do a 
>  tcpdump on helper machine) it dumps out with this error
> 
>   +41600?IO: 3/tftp, a.out error err (-5)
> 
>  Now I dont pretend to know excatly what I'm talking about but when I first
>  started playing with disless about a year ago when it dumped it gave err (-2)
>  or -3 can't quite remember, it also dump right away without trasfering any
>  of the kernel.  
> 
>   The kernel I'm trying to load is smaller than the 1.2 stable that works, and
> I got it down from sup nfsnetbsd.ecoff.

You don't say what sort of machine you have, but some PROM revision
numbers have problems loading kernels that are too large.  Take a look
at http://ftp.au.netbsd.org/werj/simonb/PMAX-type-list.html for a list
of known PROM revisions.

Simon.