I've spent the weekend attempting to load NetBSD on my uVAX II. I have a
unit with 9 MB RAM, RA81, RD54, TK50 running VMS 5.5_4 until I can load a
*nix. Under VMS I attempted to load to the RA81 which is DUA1: with
TK50 tapes.

The procedure:

I binary ftp'd the 2 tk50 files onto a i386 machine and moved them to my
VAX via DECNET File transfer over ethernet. I then copied the tk50 files
onto files which were already 512 fixed format to convert then from a
binary fixed 128 block to a fixed 512 block as below (TEMPLATE.=fixed 512
block file):

COPY TK50-FILE1-12G   TEMPLATE.

Thus prepared I followed the FAQ by initializing with erase and mounting
fixed block so:

INITIALIZE/ERASE MUA0: ""
MOUNT/FOREIGN/BLOCK=512 MUA0:

I then wrote the files to the properly initialized tapes with:

COPY TK50-FILEx-12G.; MUA0: 		(x=1,2)

I did this for the february 1.2C and the most current 1.2G I could find (4
tapes in all).

Both BOOT tapes booted. I edlabelled the RA81 per the info from a the DCL
command under VMS:

SHOW DEVICE DUA1: /FULL

TYPE	CYL	TRK	SEC	SIZ	TOTAL
RA81    1240	15	34	512	632331 (632400)

After verifying the label had been written I tried the next reboot to
get the miniroot written. The 1.2C told me that my mt device (that I'd
booted from) wasn't there. I got fed up after a few attempts and moved
on to 1.2G. Repeated all steps above for new TK's. The 1.2G allowed me to
read and then appeared to write to ra(0,1,1) from mt(0,1) which 
corresponds to MUA0:==>DUA1: if I'm not totally confused yet.  

On a reboot to execute boot from the miniroot I kept getting the message
that the directory couldn't be found. I used all the combinations of
netbsd, gennetbsd, /netbsd, /gennetbsd, with mt(0,1) and ra(0,1,1) in an
attempt to boot from either the miniroot on partition b or the tape
miniroot. Nothing but the "can't find" message. I rewrote the tape on a
different tape using the process as above but still the same result. 

Where am I going wrong? I find it difficult to believe that I screwed up
the second TK50 twice when I had absolutely no trouble with the BOOT
TK50's for both 1.2C and 1.2G. I guess I could try to 'install' the 1.2C
miniroot using the 1.2G loader but itr would be an acedemic practice
because it is not what I want to end up with due to 1.2C's problems.

Does anyone have any pointers as to how I can make this work? I've read
through the FAQ, port-vax maillist, tech-install maillist, and find things
sometimes out of date and or wrong. Thanks for your info and help during
my lurking and hopefully there's an obvious point I've overlooked.

regards,  


On Sun, 27 Jul 1997, Brian D Chase wrote:

> Some positive feedback:  I grabbed your new 1.2G kernel and it seems to be
> working well on my MicroVAX II.  I've only had it running for maybe an
> hour, but no crashing thus far.
> 
> I'm using the 1.2G binaries from my world compile of early July.  I've run
> into a few glitches, but I imagine they'll go away with a recompile of the
> utilities in question.  There are the previously mentioned "proc size
> mismatch" errors with `w' and `ps' (no big deal), and then when I try to
> compile something, `cpp' core dumps.  I would have used the official
> snapshot binaries, but I'm at home and only have 33.6kbps access.  So my
> home grown 1.2G binaries were the only reasonable ones to install.
> 
> Thanks for your efforts to fix 1.2G on the MicroVAX II.
>