Greetings!

I'm having a bit of fun with a 3100/30 and thought I'd share the wealth.
I've installed the 1.4.1 preview snapshot (see below), which is the first
time I've attempted NetBSD on a 3100. The kernel hangs when it attempts to
probe the SCSI bus containing a disk (I know this because I've moved the
disk between the busses and it follows the disk). I eventually see the
message "ncr0: no REQ for next phase, abort". The disk involved is an
RZ56 from which I am attempting to boot using the "boot rom()netbsd -d"
trick. I do have other disks I can attempt if you folks think the RZ56
is the problem. Perhaps I should try a different kernel?

The machine in question is a bit short of memory, so I was unable to
run the miniroot. Here's the saga of things I tried, including what didn't
work in the hopes that someone may benefit from the tall tales.

I have an x86 PC acting as a disk server for an office full of Macs and PCs.
The PC has been driven screaming from Linux because of the large disks 
involved; I have a 45GB RAID array, and Linux kept going insane when the
array became half full. My original intent was to install FreeBSD, but the
SCSI controller available for my tape backup is no longer supported by
FreeBSD; since NetBSD hasn't gotten around to rebuilding the SCSI subsystem,
it _is_ still supported by NetBSD. So the x86 PC is currently running NetBSD,
speaking netatalk+asun and samba and doing a magnificent job modulo extremely
long times to take a backup.

I thought I might be able to take advantage of this situation to bring NetBSD
up on my 3100 without requiring a pass through my MicroVAX II (the last time
I installed NetBSD on a VAX, it was 1.3 by tape on a MicroVAX II; not fun,
so I decided to try a different approach).

I have a spare RRD42 lying about and one of the Macintoshes in the office
has a CD writer, so I wrote the miniroot to a CD and attempted to boot it
on the 3100. Yes, this means that I have a CD to which I have written a
whole 1.2 MB. I was able to read the bootstrap from the CD and coax it into
reading the kernel using "boot rom()netbsd.gz -d". However, the system
halted after displaying the numbers like so:

   number+number+number+[number

which I attributed to a lack of RAM. The system has only the stock 4MB on
the motherboard. While this trick worked in general, I clearly was not
going to be able to install the system using the miniroot.

So I took a spare RZ56 over to the PC, disklabelled it, and unpacked all of 
the distribution sets. Then I realized that I had no idea how I was going to
write the bootstrap onto the disk, so I started over.

I took the spare RZ56 over to the PC, dd'ed miniroot.fs onto the disk (to
get the bootblocks on), editted the label with disklabel, and unpacked the
distribution sets once again. I then removed the RZ56 from the PC and 
attached it to the VAX, where I found out that (yay!) I was able to bring
up the bootloader from the hard disk. Once again, I used the "boot
rom()netbsd -d" trick to get the bootloader to read the kernel from the
disk, which appears to have been successful.

Except that the system seems to have hung while probing the SCSI bus, of
course.

Roger Ivie
ivie@cc.usu.edu