I know this isn't really NetBSD, so don't jump my bones about that,
but I'm also sure there's many out there that know the hardware, and
those are who I need to hear some suggestions from about this...this
seems like the best place to ask for advice about Pmax...I'm not a
usenet person... :)

My Maxine (I have two) has been up and running NetBSD now, but I 
continue to have alot of grief...I'm convinced its hardware, because
of the symptoms.

It almost NEVER comes up cleanly on the 1st attempt to boot after a
power-up.  This week, to avoid that situation, I did leave it up for
a few days, and it did fine.

But, I see all manner of failures if I don't let it sit for 30 minutes
or so after powering it up.  And even then, I'll more than likely see
at least one seg fault during the boot, most commonly mkdb, but even
init has failed to process rc.conf successfully at times, and exits
sometimes with a trap (load/store buss error), and falls into the db.
Power it off and back on at that point, bring it up to single user and
do the fsck's and then on to multi and it'll almost always succeed, and
then its fine the rest of the day...

Now, I've swapped the disk and memory from my offline Pmax into this
one, and vice versa (so I've seen this with both m'bds/power supplies)
and the behavior hasn't changed much at all.

Do you think this could be power supply?  Like, does anyone know if or
how to check/adjust the output to make sure.  To me buss error sounds
like memory, and thats what motivated me to swap the memory around to
see if it made any difference.

So far, I have only the one disk that has 1.4's root on it, so all of
this had been with that regardless of which Pmax it was in.  Should I
do a fresh install maybe?  I do have another disk I could generate a
new system on.  But, the thing is, once this does come up, its fine,
and will run all day with no grief....

well, I have some issues yet of course with one thing or the other, but
it doesn't fail due to anything other than my own doing for the most
part.

thanks for your input
Paul