>It may be a limitation of VMS, however it is _not_ a limitation of NetBSD.
>The prom will only be able to read the boot program from the first GB but
>that program can (and does) use the later SCSI commands to boot the system
>successfully.

I don't know why this one crops up quite so regularly almost everywhere,
especially as it has been answered (as noted) in the OpenVMS FAQ.

The console firmware in all VAXstation 3100s (-3x,-4x,-76) incorporates a disk
driver that cannot get beyond about 1GB into the disk; ask it to go further and
it effectively "wraps around" so you won't get what you want.

With OpenVMS there is no way to guarantee the physical placement of critical
files on the disk. This means both files used in the boot process before OpenVS
switches over to its own driver (which obviously can handle large SCSI disks)
and also those file (especially the dump file) used during a system crash (when
OpenVMS no longer trusts its own driver, which may well be the cause of the
crash, and chooses to use the boot driver).

With NetBSD, you can guarantee that the all the critical files live in the
first physical 1GB of the boot disk, therefore (as long as you are careful to
do this) you should be OK.

Antonio