Well, I've made some progress.  I now have NetBSD installed and running on
my KA630, but I can't ever get it to boot to a login prompt.  Here are the
problems I'm still encountering:

- I did a "disklabel -B ra0", but when I try to boot from dua0 I get
"saerror 2".  

Not too much of a problem - boot/3 mua0: still works, and I just enter:

:ra(0,0,4)netbsd

to boot with my root partition (which is on ra0e on an rd54)

I can bring the machine up and use the single-user shell to wander around,
edit configuration files, and the like.  However, when I try to exit the
shell and let the machine start up, it always freezes up - sometimes right
after "creating runtime link editor directory cache", sometimes farther into
the boot cycle.  The farthest I've seen it get is "updating motd".  On a
couple of occasions, I've gotten a panic message if I left it sitting long
enough, but usually it just sits there forever and I end up having to hit
HALT to get back to the >>> prompt.  

At this point, I'm just about ready to start writing my *own* rc scripts,
since I only want to bring up very minimal stuff on the machine anyway.  

I had a couple of crashes during the installation too - I was NFS-mounting
the tarfiles, and I found that if I sourced a script to untar them the
machine would crash about halfway through.  However, if I did each one by
hand like:

tar --unlink -xpvf /mnt2/netbsd/file.tar
sync
df -k

then the whole install went just fine.

For reference, this is a KA630 (VAXStation II/GPX w/no video card) with an
RD54 I stole out of a deceased VS2000.  It has 2 controller cards that used
to drive a pair of 8mm tapes (as MUB0: and MUC0:) and another that used to
drive an RA81 (as MUD0:).  If I remove the controller cards, it complains
that DUA0: is offline and won't let me boot, but it doesn't seem to complain
about the now-nonexistent tape drives even though the controller cards are
still installed.  I believe it has 13mb RAM.

Any ideas?  I'm going to keep hunting around the scripts, and put in some
checkpoints to see if I can track down *exactly* what's happening when the
crashes occur.  Has anyone else actually gotten their GPX to run properly?

Unfortunately, I can't write out tapes from the new distribution (if the new
one has even replaced the TK50 images) since I no longer have a machine that
can boot VMS and write to a TK50.

Getting closer...

- Tom

-- 
Tom Guptill                     Department of Physics and Astronomy
UNIX SA                         University of Rochester  Rochester, NY USA
t g p t @ p a s . r o c h e s t e r . e d u