I just tried to install NetBSD-1.3_ALPHA on my VS3100/M76. It uses SCSI
disks of 200 MB each, who show up as "DKA200 RZ2 A/2/0/00 RZ24 211B" on
the boot monitor and /dev/sd0x in NetBSD.

I put up six partitions onto the sd0 disk, and is pretty sure none of
them overlap. Then I "newfs" all except the swap b and "all disk" c,
and installed a sdboot block. Now I copy the netbsd kernel, the boot
program and rest of the system binaries onto the disk, edit /etc/fstab
so it will mount the disks at reboot and reboots the machine.

After consulting Ragge, I've learned the proper boot command should
be "B/3 DKA200" followed by "rom()netbsd" to boot the system. This
works, but I get a number of errors, with different pa numbers but
always coming in multiple copies for each disk access:

si_intr: spurious from SBC
si_dma_start: dh=0x851a8400, pa=0x864d07c4, xlen=8192, creg=0xffffe000
si_dma_start: started, flags=0x5
si_dma_stop: resid=0x0 ntrans=0x2000

My entires in the disklabel look like this (compressed to save space):

type: SCSI		disk: SCSI disk
label: rootpart		<- what is this field used for, really?
flags:			<- same question goes here
bytes/sector: 512	sectors/track: 38
tracks/cylinder: 8	sector/cylinder: 304
cylinders: 1348		total secots: 409792
rpm: 3600		interleave: 1
trackskew: 0		cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0		track-to-trace seek: 0
drivedate: 0

6 partitions:
#	size	offset	fstype [fsize	bsize	cpg]
a:	32832	0	4.2BSD	1024	8192	16	# 0 - 107
b:	65056	32832	as above			# 108 - 321
c:	409792	0	as above			# 0 - 1347
d:	16112	97888	as above			# 322 - 374
e:	16112	114000	as above			# 375 - 427
f:	279680	130112	as above			# 428 - 1347

I'm pretty sure most of those figures are ok. The sectors/track etc
were pre-entered onto the empty disk, and the fsize, bsize and cpg
numbers were picked from an already working disk (but non-bootable)

Notice the disk works o.k. for reading and writing when I'm not
booting from it. Is this a sign of "you can not boot NetBSD from disk"
or did I do something wrong?

Sincerely
	Anders Carlsson, new onto this list