Hi Craig,

On Fri, 17 Sep 1999, Craig Dewick wrote:
> Those of you who've been watching my messages about getting NetBSD onto my
> Sparc 5 will know what's going on, but since I haven't been able to figure
> out a solution (other than going right back to the beginning and setting
> up for a 'diskless' installation using NFS-mounted filesystems), here's a
> bit more of an explanation...

allways handy if you installing/updating multiple sparcs; they can allways
easily net-boot and all is ready to install.

> I formatted and partitioned the new disk under a single-user SunOS boot
> off the Sun CD-ROM on the Sparc 5, then pulled the drive out, dropped it
> into my Sparc 20 and dd'd the NetBSD miniroot onto the new disk. I then
> put the disk back into the SS5, booted the miniroot and commenced the
> installation process.

If you've allready got a disklayout, i.e. a valid disklabel; you can
initialise the partitions with `new_fs' i.e. ``newfs /dev/sdXa'' to
initialise the 'a' partition of scsidisc /dev/sdX.

When all partitions are initialised, it's just a matter of creating a
discstructure in /mnt. I.e. mount all partitions in the correct place
relative to /mnt i.e. /mnt/var, /mnt/etc, /mnt/usr or whatever scheme you
planned; create a /mnt/etc/fstab (copy it for sure to /mnt) and
downloading and untarring the stuff. 

This can all be done on your SS20, even the untarring, but dont forget to
use the /usr/mdec stuff it won't boot; it's to make the disk bootable by a
SunOs aware firmware.

BTW, I could never use the installation-prog due to kernel problems... so
I can't give you help on that one!

success,

Reinoud