On Fri, 31 Jan 2003 Robertdkeys@aol.com wrote:

> Has anyone actually tape booted VAXen lately, and if so, with what
> particular files?  I am curious if tape booting still works.

The last time I knew of it still working was with the 1.4.1 release, and
that was only for a TK50 on a Qbus controller that presented it as a
TMSCP device to a MicroVAX-II.  I may still work, to some extent, for a
setup like that.  More recently, I've poked at getting this to work from
the SCSI 4mm DAT on my MicroVAX 3100.  The drive shows up fine to the
kernel under 1.6, but I can't read or write to it.  I'm guessing, at
least in my case, that SCSI tape device support isn't quite there yet.

I'd venture to guess that it would be possible to create a boot tape of
the netbsd.ram image on some other system, and then use the tape to boot
into the install, but you wouldn't be able to read anything off the tape
once you're running with the kernel.  You'd have to load the install
sets from over the network, a CDROM, or a hard disk.

-brian.