Hi,

While waiting on the "viking" cache issue, I scrounged up parts for a
mostly usable IPC system. Unfortunately, I'm also having trouble 
getting this to work. It boots diskless fine, and the install script
completes (albeit with a few errors), but the 'installboot' doesn't
seem to be working properly, as I can't boot from the disk.

With the netbsd.GENERIC kernel, install.sh doesn't actually work.
I get:

  dmesg: magic number incorrect

The machine only has 4MB RAM, and on occasion I get 'mb_map full'
errors.

A -current kernel provided by PK doesn't load:

Booting netbsd.MOAB @ 0x4000
983008+109704+68440+[62256+72112]=0x1404a8
Program terminated

A -current kernel provided by Jason Thorpe boots and install.sh
runs with the following errors:

md_makerootwritable: not found
cp: /etc/disktab.shadow: No such file or directory

installboot: open: ... /dev/rsd0a ... device busy

The one that concerns me is the installboot error, since 
the disk doesn't seem to be bootable. It's been a while since I've
used installboot (SunOS or NetBSD), so I'm not sure what's going
wrong. When trying to boot from the newly installed disk, it 
just sits at 'Booting from: sd(0,3,0)' indefinitely. I was suspicious
of power supply load problems, because I had to disable spinup on
power on for the drive to even get the system to come up, but 
I tried it with a smaller disk that I've used before with sucess 
and it exhibits the same behavior. After playing with installboot
by hand for a while (I don't remember the exact invocation I used)
I got it to at least read something from the drive, but it 
complained about it being the wrong format. 

Now it gets weird. :) After playing with it more, I tried going
back to the 1.2 kernel (after doing the install with a -current one)
and doing /usr/mdec/binstall-- It worked perfectly, and the machine
now boots from the disk.

So I guess after all this rambling, my question is this: Where did
I go wrong that I took such a convoluted path to get the damn thing
to work?

I think I must be going insane. :)