Hi all....

I recently picked up a Sun 3/50 for the sole purpose of playing with NetBSD.  
At present the machine has no hard drive, and I don't have an ethernet card in 
my other machine (Amiga 3000, running NetBSD), so needless to say I'm probably 
going to have some fun getting this thing to boot.  After having read the Sun 
Hardware FAQ, parts of the SCSI FAQ, and nearly all of the previous posts to 
port-sun3, here are some of the problems I'm having:

1) I pulled down the boot tapes and what not, and put them on a tape,
(my tape drive is a WangTek 5150ES).  When I connect the tape drive to the 
3/50, a power-on of the tape drive results in it's light staying on, and when 
I insert a tape it doesn't automatically rewind it.  (It does the same thing 
if I turn the drive on with the 3/50 on or off).  As far as I know all 
termination is correct.  If I mask out one of the pins on the Centronics 
connection (I'm pretty sure it's not pin 25 or 26 though) then the drive will 
behave properly (i.e. light blinks on power up, and will rewind when tape is 
inserted) but the 3/50 still doesn't want to talk to it/boot from it.  (On a 
related note, I've got an old Panasonic WORM drive in a case which I'd like to 
use as an external case.  But when I hook up the drive (3/50 off), and power 
up the drive, the light on the drive doesn't "blink" once on power up.  If I 
mask out the same pin as above, then it blinks properly :-(  ).   
Is there any chance that I can boot the 3/50 with the 5150ES? (I tried 
disabling parity on the 5150ES, but that didn't help either :-( )  If I get 
the 3/50 going, will I be able to use the 5150ES from NetBSD?
Any ideas as to what's wrong (if anything) with the SCSI connections? 

2) I've got a couple of drives in my A3000 that I could "borrow" to try and 
get the 3/50 going.  One is a Quantum 105, and the other a Maxtor 7213 (213MB) 
(both SCSI, of course).  Will either of these work, and/or do I need a special 
external case?  I'd take them out and give them a try, but I don't want to do 
anything till I have a good idea that they will actually work... (i.e. I'm 
actually *using* them right now, and removing them would be a fair bit of 
work..)  Would it be better to try and dig up an old drive known to work with 
the 3/50? (e.g. an old WREN or something?)

3) Assuming one of the drives in 2) works, will a "dd" be sufficient to install
a sun-compatible disk label/root partition on the drive?  (I'm not sure how 
I'll get the root partition on the drive, but that should be a minor detail).

If I can get the 3/50 to boot just the kernel, I'm hoping I can use SLIP to
transfer the rest of the system stuff over, and get things going that way.  

My other alternative is to drag the 3/50 to a ethernet network, netboot, and 
then install NetBSD on the drives, but the question still remains as to 
whether the drives I have will work...  (I suppose I could pickup a ethernet 
card for my A3000 and then just netboot the 3/50, but I don't really want to 
spend 
any more $$ on the A3000...)

Thanks for any comments/suggestions/help, and keep up the good work....

Later...

Greg Oster

oster@cs.usask.ca
Department of Computer Science
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, CANADA