> > Darn... I wish I had your luck.  I spent about 8 hours last night rolling
> > tapes of every NetBSD sun3 release, and not one of them booted.  Yet,
> > sunos is running fine on it now.  All the tapes were fine, written on
> > my 4/260, so it is not the tapes.
> 
> Did you actually boot one of those tapes on the same machine that wrote
> it?  Did you try moving the tape drive that wrote them onto the machine
> you're trying to boot?  I.e. just because a tape is written "fine", and
> even if it works fine on the machine that wrote it, doesn't mean it'll
> work on any other machine.  QIC-60 (and even QIC-150) drives are far
> more reliable than even 3.5" floppies in this respect (at least in my
> experience), but they can still have interchange problems.

I make sure all my tapes work on all my machines.  The tapes are
fully transportable across all 6 of my old suns.  IF a tape is out of
that tolerance, I chuck the tape transport.  I usually write tapes
on sunos on my 4/260 and then use them on any of the others.  I do
this because the NetBSD tape drivers are still practically unworkable
on my machines.  They don't stream at all.  But, they do now work,
whereas earlier releases would not even work right.  This is  a
little perplexing, since the install usually went fine on earlier
releases, but once installed, the tapes would write one block, then
sit for up to 10 or more seconds, then write another block, etc.  The
sunos tapes stream properly on all my sun hardware.  So I usually use
the Sunos machines to write the tapes.  For example, writing the boot
tape on Sunos 4.1.3 on the 4/260 takes about 3 minutes...., yet, on
the 3/260 running NetBSD-1.4.2, it takes over 3 hours to write the
same 15mb to tape.  Clearly, the drivers are off, but they do now
apparently work.  I used to get gobs of scsi timeouts on them with
NetBSD, but now no timeouts, but it just takes forever to write a tape.
The timing is definitely off somewhere in the code to cause that kind
of lag in operation sitting with that much idle time between writes.

The sunos 4.1.1 written on the 4/260 booted/installed fine on the 3/60,
so the alignment, density, etc., is good across the transports in question.

I changed boot proms on the 3/60 last night, before going to bed, so I
will retry on the 3.0.1 prom tonight, and see if that makes any difference.
Sometimes boot prom revisions generate problems.

Also, I will try a sun Archive tape with a real scsi interface, instead
of the sun Archive mt interposer tapes, and see if that makes any
difference.  And, I will roll an 18 track tape (DC6150) on an SS1 box,
and see if that can work on the sun 3/60 with an 18track transport,
now that I have the 150mb capable prom installed.  The problems could
be something stupid, like everyone else is using direct scsi tapes,
and I am using standard sun3 mt-interposer driven QIC tape drives.

Also, I made up a special boot tape using SunOS bits and the NetBSD
miniroot.  I did not get a chance to do much with that, last night, 
but the thought occurred to me that it might boot a little differently.
The miniroots are just files to the loaders, so it should not make any
difference.  That is how I got 4.1.3 up on the 4/260, with only a busted
4.1 sparc boot tape, a 4.1.3 cd, no cd drive, and no network......(:+}}.

I really am not complaining.  I would not have stuck with it since 1.3,
on the sun3 toyz, if I were not interested in them.  It just seems I
have rubbed the wrong Wrabbit's foote, or somesuch, or have really
rotten luck, or just have not incanted correctly under the full moon
in july, or have really rotten hardware.  I can't attribute it directly
to the hardware, yet., and I am not totally a *nix dummy....(:+{{...

I WILL get these sun3's up... I WILL.  I WILL.  I WILL......
Then, I will try to fix the silly tape drivers so they work.
I gotta have at least a pair of them up, for testing and building
to make that work, though.  With a pair of 3/60's, a 3/110, and
a 3/260 up running sunos, I ought to be able work up something other
than the 3/260 on NetBSD.  Out of curiousity, is anyone actually
tape booting NetBSD on sun3's besides me, or is everyone netbooting?
Who has actually used tapes on NetBSD sun3's, besides me?

Oh, well, time to head to the barn, and fire up the sun3's!

Thanks

Bob