> I've installed a snapshot I built a week or so ago on my IPX and
> Classic.  The Classic works fine.  The IPX, however, will boot from
> the net just fine but dies with `Data Access Exception' when I try to
> boot from the internal SCSI drive.  I've re-run installboot and
> relabeled the disk with edlabel, in case either of those was the
> problem, but that hasn't helped.

It's a long shut, but...some SPARCstation ROM revs don't know how to
use 10-byte CDBs.  This means that such ROMs can access only the first
1G of the disk.  This in turn means that the second-stage bootblocks
(the stuff normally kept in /boot) must live entirely in the first 1G
of the disk.  Given how little control you have over what blocks /boot
gets stored in, this means that in practice your boot partition must be
entirely below the 1G mark.  If this isn't true, the ROMs will read the
wrong blocks from disk because they'll lose the high bits of the block
number.

It might be worth checking, and if your boot partition extends beyond
the 1G point, changing things around so that it doesn't, to see if that
fixes it.  (I ran into this problem on an SS1+; I don't know whether
the IPX ever shipped with such ROMs.)

Note that the size of the partition is not directly relevant; a small
partition that exists past the 1G point will fail as badly as a huge
partition that starts at offset zero.  It's whether the sectors
involved are far enough from the beginning of the pack that matters.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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