Armed with the knowledge that the "ramdisk.fs.gz" was really a miniroot sheep
in disguise, I tried again.

I created a "swap" partition on my Ultra 5+ so that NetBSD would have
something to load into.  I then gunzip'd and dd'd the ramdisk.fs.gz into it,
and did a "boot disk:b netbsd -s".

It booted and the GENERIC kernel came up.

The good news is that this time, this kernel recognized the CD-ROM drive.

The bad news is, in the absence of "-as", it assumed that it was to mount
root from "wd0b" (good assumption, since that's what it was booted out of)
but when it tried to mount the root filesystem from there, I got the same
exact pciide error messages I quoted in great detail in my original posting.
(Not too surprising, really.)

Just for fun, I rebooted with "boot disk:b netbsd -as" and tried to tell it
to use "cd0a" and "cd0f" as the root partition, of type "cd9660".  It could
mount cd0a but obviously that's a directory tree and not a "real" root, so
it panic'd at not finding init.

The "cd0f" was a guess.  When viewed from Solaris, the ISO 9660 disc has an
"s0" and "s5" subdirectory under /cdrom/cdrom0, so I assumed that "s5" was
slice 5 a.k.a. partition "f", so I tried "cd0f".  It said it couldn't mount
root, so obviously that wasn't right.

Here's what the CD looks like from Solaris:

ultra5+:1:4 [/cdrom/netbsd_sparc641.5] # ls
s0/ s5/

ultra5+:1:5 [/cdrom/netbsd_sparc641.5] # ls s5
s5:
bin   dev   dist  etc   kern  mnt   mnt2  sbin  tmp   usr

ultra5+:1:6 [/cdrom/netbsd_sparc641.5] # ls -l s5
s5/bin not found
s5/dev not found
s5/dist not found
s5/etc not found
s5/mnt not found
s5/mnt2 not found
s5/kern not found
s5/sbin not found
s5/tmp not found
s5/usr not found

(I don't know why these come back as "not found" - anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?)

The CD-R partition map is

ultra5+:1:17 [/cdrom/netbsd_sparc641.5] # prtvtoc /vol/dev/rdsk/c0t2d0/ne
tbsd_sparc641.5/s0
* /vol/dev/rdsk/c0t2d0/netbsd_sparc641.5/s0 partition map
*
* Dimensions:
*     512 bytes/sector
*     640 sectors/track
*       1 tracks/cylinder
*     640 sectors/cylinder
*     271 cylinders
*     271 accessible cylinders
*
* Flags:
*   1: unmountable
*  10: read-only
*
*                          First     Sector    Last
* Partition  Tag  Flags    Sector     Count    Sector  Mount Directory
       0      0    00          0    163200    163199
       5      0    00     163200     10240    173439

I would think that partition 5 would correspond to "cd0f" in NetBSD, but
apparently not.

Anyway, this is as far as I got.  I don't want to (ultimately, anyway) install
NetBSD onto the internal EIDE drive; it would be great if the "ramdisk.fs.gz"
miniroot could mount a root partition from the CD-ROM somehow, so I could
avoid ever making any references to "wd0" at all.

	- Greg