Hi,

   Thanks to Rick, I have ftp'ed the binaries snowwhite. Can these help me get 
   started? I am a bit worried about the TK50 tape, as I don't know if I can
   get a drive for a 11/750. A friend of mine is a member of DECUS here so I am 
   sure we could wangle something if there is  no other way.

Hmm, bootstrapping a 11/750 is an interesting question and it would be really
nice if someone with the hardware could figure out how.

A couple of thoughts/comments:
- the only tape driver in the current kernel supports unibus/qbus tape mscp
  (ie. if you 9 track is anything else, there isn't a driver yet)
- I don't know what it takes to get "racopy" to work properly once it is
  loaded into memory. (I suspect it uses stuff set up by vmb, so does that
  mean that racopy has to be loaded off the console tu58?)
- I could create a "dd" image of a root fs (ie dearchive rootfs.cpio and
  then dd the disk partition) and then you would "just" have to get that
  image onto the first N blocks of the RAnn disk. Since you mentioned VMS,
  you might know how to do that using VMS QIOs to a disk mounted foreign
- In the 4.3BSD installation guide, there were little toggle in at the
  console programs that read a tape block into memory to start bootstrapping.
  A similar program that read an entire file into memory could get the
  miniroot.fs into memory, but I am not sure if it could be booted at that
  point. (ie. what has to be done so that the vmb console routines are
  available to the boot code at this point?)

I think that, eventually, the idea would be to have some stuff that you
put on the console tu58 to boot the rest off 9 track tape, but we aren't
there now.

If you want a "dd" image of the rootfs, just let me know, rick