hmm, I finally got around to doing this repetivily with multiple drives
and it always seems to stomp my label (the geometry of the drive). Any
ideas? Instead of using the swap partition, I am using a blank (or
effectively so) drive and repartitioning it and reformating it. I am using
parition a instead of b. so it is on the beginning of the disk. When I do
the dd, I believe it writes over the label, because when I boot again it
tells me the label is missing/corrupt depending on the system. I am not
running newfs on it, just format because it is supposed to be a swap
partition and I thought you made swap partitions by using format to create
it and format it and then you could mount it as swap or do the dd in my
case. Anyway, as I have said before I have tried it on two hard drives
with the same effect. My guess is I need to make an A partition of some
size, 100 blocks? and then make the B parition 60,000 blocks or so and do
the dd there, hopefully then it will be farther down the disk and unable
to kill the label. Any ideas? Thanks. BTW, why is there now release of
NetBSD-1.3.1 for sun3x?
	-taco

On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, Gordon W. Ross wrote:

> > Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 20:13:34 -0700 (PDT)
> > From: "Todd 'Taco' Hansen" <taco@tshansen.reshall.ucsd.edu>
> > 
> > Neither the installation guide nor the FAQs go into any detail on how to
> > install NetBSD using a SunOS system. I am up a creak until I can figure
> > out how to do it and I was wondering if perhaps someone could list the
> > steps that I need to take to get it to a point that the INSTALL manual
> > takes over again? Thanks. [...]
> 
> Ah yes, that procedure should be added to the installation guide.
> It's fairly simple.  Here's how you do it:
> 
> Boot SunOS on the machine, and get the file:  miniroot.gz
> onto someting the machine can access (disk file, network).
> 
> Get SunOS into single-user mode in order to be sure that
> nothing will be using swap space.  (as root: kill 1)
> 
> Copy the miniroot image onto your swap device: i.e.
>   gzip -dc .../miniroot.gz | dd of=/dev/rsd0b obs=32k
> 
> Reboot using the swap device: i.e.
>   reboot -- 'sd(0,0,1)'
> 
> After it boots, you should pick up with the INSTALL document
> at the point where you have booted from the miniroot.
> 
> 

--
"Hey!  Who took the cork off my lunch??!"
                -- W. C. Fields

Todd Hansen, KD6YPS
http://sehplib.ucsd.edu/~tshansen/