On Sun, 9 Apr 2006 13:56:59 +0200
"Amadeus Stevenson" <amadeus.stevenson@gmail.com> wrote:

> So I booted a netbsd-2.0 sparc64 installation cd which I had handy,
> and during network install changed the base and set dir so it pulled
> the NetBSD-3.0/sparc binaries.
> 
> I then manually ftp'ed the kern-GENERIC_SUN4U.tgz from
> NetBSD-3.0/sparc and installed this as /netbsd.

You better do it with NetBSD-3.0 sparc and sparc64.
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sparc64/ and read the message about a new
bootloader. This might be your problem, or it might be that NetBSD-3.0 now uses
64-bit offsets for UFS or something like that. Also after you install NetBSD
sparc, I think you need to copy sparc64 specific MAKEDEV script into /dev and
rebuild all the devices.

cp -p /path_to/MAKEDEV /dev
cd /dev
rm -rf [a-z]*
./MAKEDEV all

You may find the following email interesting:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-sparc64/2005/02/11/0006.html