rdkeys@unity.ncsu.edu wrote:

> I was trying to bring up Netbsd on a DECstation 2100 and 3100 this
> weekend.  I used a sun3 box to write the netbsd-1.3.3 pmax diskimage
> to both either the root or swap partitions on drives set up on the sun3.
> When ported to the DEC boxes, they would not boot.  I sense the disklabels
> are not exactly right, possibly.   Anything I might do differently to
> set up the disks or make them readable by the DEC boxes?
> 
> When written to the swap partition, and trying to boot it errored out
> with a boot block fmt error.
> 
> When written to the root partition, and trying to boot, it errored out
> with some register dumps(?) that seemed to indicate it did not like
> reading something.

The actual position of the disklabel varies between ports.  Having said
that, it appears the boot NetBSD on the Sun 3 and the pmax stick the
disklabel 64 bytes into the first sector on the disk.  What happens on
the Sun3 if you do this:

	# dd if=disklabel of=/dev/sdXc bs=32k
	# disklabel sdX

where X is the SCSI id of the disk you want to use for the pmax?


You need to have something valid on the first blocks of the disk
- this is where the firmware reading in the bootblocks.  The
practice of having two copies of the diskimage (one at the start
of the disk and one at 32MB into the disk) means that you can boot
the kernel of the first diskimage and use the second diskimage
as the root filesystem - allowing you to newfs the original
diskimage and start with a clean root filesystem.  The new ramdisk
kernels that will be in 1.4 (and available in the snapshot on
ftp://ftp.NetBSD.ORG/pub/NetBSD/arch/pmax/snapshot/1999-02-06 - hmm,
there's no diskimage in that snapshot) have the root filesystem in an
internal memory filesystem and don't need the second diskimage.


What sort of errors are you seeing when you boot of the diskimage?  A
typical boot should look like this on a 3100:

	>> boot -f rz(0,0,0)netbsd
	Boot: rz(0,0,0)netbsd
	Size: 1250336+55744+106548
	Starting at 0x80030000

	[ preserving 94604 bytes of netbsd symbol table ]
	Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998
	    The NetBSD Foundation, Inc.  All rights reserved.

How far do it get?

Simon.