On Thu, 6 Feb 1997, Phil Nelson wrote:

>   I recently tried to boot NetBSD-1.2 on my SparcStation 5.  I'm currently
> running SunOS 4.1.3_U.  Here is what I did:
> 
>   I had an extra 100 meg partition so I put in a copy of netbsd and
> untarred base.tar.gz into that partition.  (/dev/sd1a)
> 
>   I then tried to bood from sd1a by saying:
> 
>      boot disk1:a netbsd -s
> 
> The rom monitor then proceeds to tell me that the file read off the disk is
> not an executable file.  I tried a stripped version of netbsd also.  I then
> tried a copy of the miniroot with the 1.2 distribution.  In all cases, netbsd
> is declared to "not an executable file".
> 
> Did I forget to set some ROM environment variable?  
no, not in this case...
you need to set one to make your sun boot netbsd by default.

> Does anyone have any helpful hints?
I think you have to put a special boot loader somewhere on your partition,
look into /netbsd-root/usr/mdec, at least on a hp there are some boot
programs, sdboot for scsi-disks, rdboot for hpib, you should find boot and
bootxx ( or xxboot ?! ) there and a script called installboot. look into
the corresponding man-pages, you need to install one of these programs (
maybe both, I installed netbsd-sparc only once, and that was half a year
ago... ) using the installboot program. It's definitely needed by the
PROM.

may the spook be with you !
MichaeL