>> I have trouble seeing any problem: "boot disk" versus "boot net"
>> seems about as easy as it gets to me.

>> What am I missing?

> FWIW, I wanted to do this with a Sun 3/80 that has a 1gig disk inside
> it, but can't boot from the disk.

What goes wrong?  (I'm having trouble imagining a failure mode that
would break booting from the disk but would permit NetBSD to use the
disk once booted.)

However, assuming that the problem you have with booting from the disk
really is unfixable...

> (the concept i'm using is: grab bootblocks over the net, load the
> kernel from there too, and once things get up and running, using
> nfsroot, then mount your local disk on /altroot and symlink things
> such as /altroot/bin to /bin etc, because its faster to load from
> disk into memory than from the network.  go figure ;)

You don't need to go that far.

Just build a kernel

	config netbsd root on sd0a type ffs

(or wherever your root is) and boot that kernel from the network.  You
will need to make sure /netbsd on the disk matches the kernel actually
loaded over the network, but that strikes me as much less fragile than
the symlink hell you have now (and if it breaks it will not break basic
functionality, only things that depend on kernel symbols).

You don't even need to build a new kernel, if you're willing to
intervene manually at every boot (which sounds like the case from what
you said): boot with -a and when it prompts you for the root device,
specify sd0a (or whatever).

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