[ Please Cc: me, I'm not subscribed to this list ]

Hello,

you wrote:

	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.)

I am in this situation. Friend has a Sparcstation SLC which used to run
NetBSD, but it got somewhat broken (don't know the cause) and now if we
try to boot BSD from disk, it prints only some error like "Memory
access not aligned", don't remember exactly. But it can boot the kernel
from a tape, an then it's possible to access the disk normally. So I
would like to boot a kernel from a tape (or from net), but to mount sd0a
as the root filesystem, and I did't know how to do it. 

Your suggestion with configuring the root fs to the kernel is helpful, 
but how do I make the resulting kernel bootable from tape? I tried 
dd-ing in to the tape, but it did't work.

Thanks	Pavel