well, I'm getting closer.  Either 'mksunbootcd' or the alpha 'installboot'
was stepping on the pmax boot stuff.  I didn't have luck with 'installboot
-i .....' on the pmax, so I decided to try a pmax only boot cd.  So I made
the iso image with "boot.pmax" and "netbsd.pmax" in the root directory,
then (on a 1.4.1 pmax) I did:

  installboot -v pmax.iso bootxx_cd9660

I got the installboot and bootxx_cd9660 from
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/pmax/snapshot/1999-12-06/binary/sets/base.tgz

Then when I tried to boot it (boot 3/rz6/netbsd.pmax), I got:

NetBSD/pmax 1.4P ISO 9660 Primary Bootstrap
>> NetBSD/pmax Secondary Boot, Revision 1.0
>> (root@vlad, Sat Mar 4 14:34:30 EST 2000)
Boot: 3/rz6/netbsd.pmax
rz6: no disklabel
open 3/rz6/netbsd.pmax: Device not configured

KN03-AA V5.1b.....


This is with a Sun Model 411 SCSI CD-ROM.  "cnfg 3" shows it as:
  CD-ROM CDU-8012  SONY  3.1a

Its on a DECstation 5000/240


I'll try later on a 5000/200, but don't have great hopes.

Any ideas?

Thanks
-Dan


On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Simon Burge wrote:

> Uwe Lienig wrote:
> 
> > AFAIK, you are out of luck. DECstation's no matter of their type won't
> > boot off a CD-ROM with a CDFS (iso whatever) on it. The problem lies in
> > the bootprom, which assumes, that the blocksize of the cdrom is 512
> > bytes (which isn't true for CD-ROMs using CDFS). If anybody knows, how
> > to get around this problem, let me know ...
> 
> It's true that an ISO9660 filesystem is layed out in terms of 2048 byte
> blocks, but the PROM only knows that it needs to load the first stage
> boot blocks from a certain 512 byte sector range - it doesn't care where
> in the 2048 byte logical blocks where these sectors are.  This first
> stage is then smart enough to find the second stage on the CDFS and the
> second stage loads the kernel.  We (well, not me - I don't have a burner
> but Philip Tait tested some images I made) have successfully booted
> CD-ROMs on DECstations that have ISO9660 filesystems.
> 
> Simon.
>