Hi,

Ok, I've gotten to the part of trying to write the image to a spare 
drive. First I emptied the whole disk and created a partion on it using 
disklabel and formatted it using newfs. The output of "dislabel -r sd5" 
looks like this:

# disklabel -r sd5

# /dev/rsd5c:
type: SCSI
disk: RZ58     (C) DE
label: NetBSD
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 85
tracks/cylinder: 15
sectors/cylinder: 1275
cylinders: 2112
total sectors: 2698061
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # microseconds
track-to-track seek: 0  # microseconds
drivedata: 0

5 partitions:
#        size    offset     fstype  [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
 a:   2698061         0       boot                      # (Cyl.    0 - 
2116*)
 c:   2698061         0     unused      0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 
2116*)

So, then I tried to write the image to it using dd:

# dd if=/dev/cd0a of=/dev/sd5a
dd: /dev/sd5a: Read-only file system
4+0 records in
3+0 records out
1536 bytes transferred in 0.131 secs (11725 bytes/sec)

I also tried using /dev/rsd5a as device and using a chmod 777 on 
/dev/sd5a; all with the same result. So, poking around a bit I tried 
using installboot to write anything to the disk:

# installboot -v /dev/rsd5a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffs
File system:         /dev/rsd5a
File system type:    raw (blocksize 8192, needswap 0)
Primary bootstrap:   /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffs
Bootstrap start sector: 1
Bootstrap sector count: 15
Bootstrap load address: 0x80700000
Bootstrap exec address: 0x80700000
Writing bootstrap
Writing boot block
installboot: Writing `/dev/rsd5a': Read-only file system
installboot: Set bootstrap operation failed

So, the big question that remains for me is, how do I get my filesystem 
not to be read-only?

Many thanks in advance.

Louis

Henry Bent wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, Louis Wevers wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Perhaps a bit stupid question, but I can't seem to figure it out. I try
>> to boot my 5000/240 from a freshly created CD (created from the ISO
>> image available from the NetBSD site).
>>
>> I tried something like: "boot 3/rz0" and "boot 3/rz0/netbsd"
>>
>> Unfortunately it only comes back to me with something like: "?IO: 3/rz0
>>        (cmd: rd)"
>>
>> When I boot the installed 1.6 on the machine, I can read the CD
>> properly. file structure looks normal etc.
>>
>> Any ideas on how to boot the machine from CD?
>>
>> Many thanks in advance,
>> Louis
>>
>
> Hi Louis,
>
> You need a CD-ROM drive that can do 512 byte hardware sectors if you want
> to boot from it.  There's a list of them at
> http://home.comcast.net/~safeharborbay/c128/scsi/suncds.html but I have
> no affiliation with that site and can't guarantee anything.  I personally
> have used RRD42s and various Toshiba models in the past.
>
> If that fails and you have an extra SCSI hard drive, you can just dd a CD
> image to the hard drive and boot off of that.  I've done it a few times
> and neither Ultrix nor NetBSD seem to mind that you're not using a real
> CD-ROM.
>
> --
> Henry Bent
> hbent@cs.oberlin.edu
>
>