Jon Lindgren wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, J. Buck Caldwell wrote:
>
> > Yep - Card placement turned out to be the problem. My VAX4200 is now happily
> > churning out a custom kernel on it's own disks.
>
> Did you have any troubles booting off the local disks?  Did you have to do
> anything nonstandard when installing boot blocks?

No - although I didn't use (never have) the install kernel. Did the following:
Netbooted from my PC box, then:
disklabel -I -i ra0     (and setup a 40 cylinder A, an 80 cylinder B, full-drive
C, remainder F)
newfs /dev/rra0a; newfs /dev/rra0f
mount /dev/rra0a /mnt
mkdir /mnt/usr
mount /dev/rra0f /mnt/usr
(untar all of the distribution files)
disklabel -B -b /mnt/usr/mdec/raboot ra0

That did the trick for me. Don't forget to run ./MAKEDEV std, otherwise you get
that damn no console message.

> I managed to handroll the system onto my box, but have never been able to
> get it to boot.  I don't get any primary bootstrap messages at all.  I can
> hobble up the err msg tonight if anyone is interrested.  It's
> [trying to] boot off a CMD controller.

Once everything above plus the usual file editing was done,  I rebooted and
straight-away got the bootblocks countdown and such.

> Also, fsck seems to fail on this box with an "illegal instruction" - it
> just falls back to the prompt (it doesn't drop to the prom, just back to a
> shell prompt.).

Never seen that. Can't help you there.

> It's gotta be something I'm doing wrong, but I'm not sure what.  Could
> the hardware be flakey?
> Jon

-J. Buck Caldwell