> 	Maybe something strange with the disklabel?
> 	Can you switch the ss1 drive into the ipx and see if it behaves
> 	the same as a test?

What about the other way around?  Let the IPX do a vanilla install,
then move the HD over to the SS1?   The IPX install went fine,
yesterday.  I have done that with VAXen before, and it seems
to do fine.

That is how I inadvertently got OpenBSD up on a sun4/110 vme crate.
I swapped the drive over, and was about to set it up for sunos,
and the silly thing booted and ran OpenBSD fine.  Alas, when
I tried that with NetBSD, it was a nogo.  Now that the scsi
drivers are better on the sun4 hardware, I should retry that.

It could also have something to do with the drive setups.
I am using 4 HDS on the SS1, sd0/1/2/3, with boot on sd0,
as opposed to the usual sun sd3.  The IPX only has 1 drive.
Are there any gotchas there that might give problems?
That did not seem to be the case.  What happened was that
NetBSD did not do the disklabel, but just aborted to prom,
where it should have written the label to the disk drive.
On rebooting, it came back up in OpenBSD.  Should I do
a lowlevel on a vax to freshen up the drive before attempting
the NetBSD install?  I would not expect that to be important.
But, sometimes strange things get written to disks that make
swapping OS's problematic.

Getting there.....

Bob