OK, this weekend I picked up 2 vaxen..  A Vaxstation III/GPX and a
Vaxstation 2000.  Thus far I have been unable to get NetBSD on either of
them.  I am afraid I need some serious help here..........
Forgive me if I don't have all the details as I am away from the Vaxen
right now but here goes..
The VSIII has 3 MFM drives, a floppy,  and the controller, a TK50 and
controller, and a DELQN? network card.  Anyhow, this vax will *not* boot
any of the MFM drives.  A "show device" lists the controllers for the
tk50, the disks, and the the network card.  No drives are listed under the
controllers and a "boot" searches through everything and comes up with the
network card as a possible boot device.  I tried booting from the tk50 and
this might work if I had the correct media (and I cleaned the drive).  I
do have 1 tk50 tape just not sure how to make it a NetBSD boot tape.  I
tried booting from the network card and keep getting a 4b error (CTRLERR
Boot Device I/O Error)..
Now the VS2000 seems to work just fine.  It will boot right up to Ultrix
(I have no password) on it's MFM drive.  I have an external TK50 for this
which I am assuming I can just use a scsi cable to hook them
together?  Anyhow, dropping this to the chevron and booting from the
ethernet (ESA0) results in info displayed on the mop debugger.  Looks like
it's picking up it's info through the network just fine - but then my mop
crashes (is mop broken on NetBSD 1.5 Pmax??) The VS2k just sits there at
the -ESA0 prompt like it's loading...
OK, so here are the questions...
On the uVaxIII, could there be something wrong with the Ethernet and Drive
controller cards even though they show up on a device list?  If so, is
there anyone on the list who could hook me up with a qbus network card for
this beastie?  I am dying to get this one running as it's quick!  Any info
on the MFM controller would be appreciated as well.  I probably have to
clean the qbus backplane - how the heck do I do this?
On the VS2k, this machine has 4 megs of ram - 2 on board (I believe) which
means there is a 2 meg card in it.  Does anyone have or know where I can
get some more ram for this thing?
Also, can comeone on this list who has actually netbooted/net installed
NetBSD 1.5 on a vax PLEASE write me and let me know how the heck you did
it?  I will be booting these off of a Dec5k240 running Netbsd 1.5.  Please
don't bother pointing me to endless websites describing the
process.  Trust me I have been to them all already and not one of them is
the same as any other.  I need some hand holding here.
I can address any specific questions you have about the hardware, and
error codes later on today - I am just not near the vaxen right now.
Thanks to you all in advance!

-Linc Fessenden

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