I'm another newbie to NetBSD, but I hope some of you can spare the time
to help me out.  I have access to several old DECstations that I'd like
to put to good use.  I have a choice of several flavors: 5000/200
5000/25 3100S 3100.

I set up BOOTP and TFTP on my Linux box and got one of the 5000/200's
to boot the netbsd.ecoff kernel.  The DECsystem mounted the root
filesystem (/installation/netboot/diskimage.tgz) successfully via NFS.
At the prompt I was able to run sysinst and start the installation
process.  Everything goes fine until I try to partition and format the
disk.  It gets to the point where it asks me to enter a disk label.  I
type in something and press enter, which causes the system to hang.
There's no messages or any disk activity.  I discovered that I can enter
some sort of debugger if I hit the DO key, but it's not much use to me
at this point, except to reboot the system.

I originally got a few warnings when I selected the option to partition
the disks.  It complained about Ultrix partition information.  I then
tried to use disklabel to fix things up.  (I'm not familiar with
disklabel.)  I did the following:

disklabel /dev/rz0 > protofile

#edited protofile to set the RPM to 3600 and interleave to 1 (These
parameters were set to zero and caused
# some warnings).  I think the other info matched my disk, but I'm not
sure.  I didn't find all of the
# numbers in the disk datasheet.  I'm using a Seagate ST41200N disk.

disklabel -R -r /dev/rz0 protofile

This seems to write the partition table without giving an error.  It
reads back fine.  The installation program
no longer complains, but it still hangs in the same place.

I was happy when NetBSD booted up, but now it has me stumped since I
don't know much about NetBSD or DECstations.  I can give you information
about what disklabel prints out and what the disk datasheet says, but I
don't really know what to do from here.

Thanks,

Jeff Webb
mustang@eel.ufl.edu