I have this ancient sparc dinosaur (old vme 12 slot crate with an early
sparc cpu in it).  My sunos tapes are full of hard errors, so I thought
I would try loading up netbsd.  I used the dead sunos tape to boot and
load the miniroot onto swap, and then booted of that fine.  Alas, after
coming up, the netbsd 1.3.3 sparc would not read anything I put into
the mt02 archive tape drive.  Interestingly, I pulled the CPU, and put
in a sun 3/160 cpu, and loaded up netbsd, and it worked fine.

Anyone know why the sparc suite will not read the tape, yet the sun3
suite does fine, on the same hardware?  I hope my sparc is not too
early for netbsd......(:+{{.....

Anyone know of a set of tape building scripts for building a sparc
tape boot set, like on the sun3?  I cobbled some together, but they
did not seem to be exactly what was needed.  Surely someone has done
this kind of thing or the early sparcs?

Any pointers or insights are appreciated.

Thanks

Bob Keys