need a bit of early boot help

[Dave McGuire <mcguire%neurotica.com@localhost>]

  Hi folks, I'm working on a VAX-11/780.  I'm (forgive me) trying to 
get VMS 4.7 up and running on it, from a known working (on an 11/750) 
system disk, and it hangs right after printing the banner.

  As a diagnostic tool for now, I wanted to boot NetBSD 1.6.1 on it, to 
see if it'd get any further.  It stops in a suspicious place: Right 
after printing "root file system type: ffs", on the next line, it prints 
an 'S' and hangs.  The processor is still in run state.

  In an instance of simh with a system configured identically to my 
hardware, I see that 'S' is the first character of this date stamp:

Sun Nov  9 22:05:50 GMT 2003

  ...which is the line immediately following "root file system type: ffs".

  I could start digging, but I figured I'd ask for some quicker help 
here.  What prints that date stamp?  What (in NetBSD) could cause the 
machine to hang right there, does anyone have any idea?

            Thanks,
            -Dave

--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA