> 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?

What is in ``disklabel''?  If I knew what was wanted or had one from
a 2100/3100 box (RZ24 drive or RZ23 drive), then I could maybe get
that onto the drive after the sun had formatted it and written the
diskimage to the a partition.

> 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.

Maybe I should try that.

> 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

It never got this far.  After I booted it and hit <CR> it came
back after about 2-3 seconds of spinning up the disk to the monitor.

It came back with ``boot fmt'' error, and that I was thinking meant it
did not like the initial label on the disk, so it halted there with
some register dumping.  It did the same thing on both my boxes, with
RZ23 or RZ24 drives, formatted and set up on the sun3.

>From the sun3, can I correctly disklabel from sunos 4.1.1 the label
that the netbsd pmax or 2100/3100 box should see?

> 	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.
> 

Thanks

Bob