From bc3c@q.res.cmu.edu Fri Jul 25 20:31:27 1997 Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 03:24:52 -0400 (EDT) From: "B. Chow" Subject: Re: DecStation 3100 standalone tests Hi, thanks for your enclosure, I added it as another page to the web pages. Hopefully now more people can find what they're looking for, on these old machines! Cool! DS3100 and a VS3100... heh, i've never owned a VAX, but i've had an account on one, and it ran ultrix. Really slow *ug* :( NetBSD was quite a challenge to install. I would suggest, if you don't know anything about NetBSD, to read about FreeBSD and NetBSD for the i386, since it is most documented. Specifically, the biggest trouble I had, was creating the partitions. I started with a DS3100, a spare disk, and a 600 meg disk with Ultrix 4.4 on it (and the NetBSD install files). The first part, which is toughest, was to create the NetBSD partitions on the spare disk. Of course, Ultrix can't read NetBSD ffs partitions, so that's a different challenge. Basically I grabbed the Ultrix port of disklabel(8) and the rzboot/bootrz files for NetBSD (check with the docs they provided on the netbsd site). The next step was the most challenging one: creating the partition. Nobody and no docs told me how to set up the partition file for NetBSD. What you should do, if you never seen NetBSD partition (disklabel(8)) screens, you should grab one off of i386 NetBSD or something. Use that as your template, and that template file works, overcoming the first flurry of segfaults coming from disklabel. once the disklabel was written, the miniroot can be written to the disk, ala the commands in the installation FAQ. Once that was done, I shutdown, switched the two drives' IDs and restarted the machine cold. Of course I also had to set the Bootpath to rz(0,1,0)netbsd instead of rz(0,1,0)vmunix. NetBSD eventually came up flawlessly (I had to play with that partition thinggy quite a bit!). Then I newfs(8)'ed the other partitions I created, and mounted the ultrix drive (NetBSD reads Ultrix drives well), and untarred the rest of NetBSD. After that, it was pretty much done. I hope this helps. NetBSD was a real pain imho to install, especially with no floppy drive.