Hi Hasan,

With the floppy drive not running, the best thing you could do is to set up an
install server for NetBSD: basically this means a unix box (any flavour will
do) with TFTP, RARP, bootparamd and NFS. Also see the 'diskless' entry on the
NetBSD website. Furthermore, you will need to fix the CMOS chip, so it will
remember things like it's ethernet ID. There are several companies that sell
these chips, new. Once you have obtained one, see 
http://www.squirrel.com/squirrel/sun-nvram-hostid.faq.html
which will tell you how to put sensible information back into a new PROM,
or one suffering from amnesia.

Regards, Paul Boven.

> Ladies/Gents:
> 	I have received a Sparc IPC that I'd like to make into a router using
> NetBSD. The machine has one hard drive with SunOS 4 on it. The CMOS battery is
> dead (as witnessed by the Mac address being FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF on bootup). The
> floppy drive doesn't work. 
> 	SunOS 4 has /usr mounted from a second drive (which is inconspiciously
> missing from the machine) -- therefore there is no way to boot into the OS
> normally. I suppose I could get it to boot single-user mode, but I don't know
> enough about SunOS 4 to do so (boot -s doesn't seem to have any effect). 
> 	My question is: Is there any hope of getting NetBSD (or a similarly
> advanced OS) onto the box or am I stuck with it? Thanks for the help!
> - --
> Hasan =)

-- 
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| I still cry sometimes when I remember you                   |
| I still cry sometimes when I hear your name - Ilse de Lange |
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| Paul Boven,  <p.boven@chello.nl>  PE1NUT  QRV 145.575       |
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