Re: Upgrading a 90s laptop from 5.1 to 10 -- no FD or CDROM

[joelp%sdf.org@localhost]

> As another test you could "boot -a" the netbsd10 kernel and then point
> it to a netbsd-10 installed USB or PCMCIA drive as a root filesystem.
> While you probably already have everything after the boot pretty much
> covered, it's always nice to see it come up and run completely from a
> netbsd-10 filesystem :)
>
> You should also be able to pick up a CF to laptop PATA adaptor, which
> would allow you to boot from a CF card. More usefully it should (*)
> allow you to boot NetBSD-10 on the system, install onto the CF card in
> the pcmcia slot, and then be able to move that to the IDE bay to boot,
> giving you a way to test a full NetBSD-10 install without overwriting
> the existing disk.
>
> *: "should" - potential hand waving and profanities regarding made up
> disk geometries and older BIOS behaviour.
>
> David
>

I was wondering if it was worth updating the boot manager (fdisk -B wd0).
For now, multiboot works for me to boot to a different root (wd1) than the
boot disk (which is still 5.1 on wd0). I have the sets on a CF adapter
(wd1) and I added a menu item to the wd0 boot.cfg to boot NetBSD 10;
something like this:
  menu=NetBSD10_RC1 on wd1a:multiboot netbsd10 root=wd1a console=pc
/etc/fstab on wd1 has root set to wd1a. Works. This gives me the
satisfaction of a fully unattended boot into NetBSD 10 on a 1998 laptop
:-) Fun project!

I gave i386 GENERIC_TINY a try but it crashed on what looked like a
deadlock. Faced with the (tedious) task of trimming i386 GENERIC to get
the limited memory back on this device, I'm going to call it good. Maybe
next winter (I did find my old 5.1 kernel config).

I did learn some things about the init process in NetBSD, for example, so
all this has been a worthwhile. Hopefully that pays off when I find some
aarch64 device to try to bring into the NetBSD 10 ecosystem -- I've always
been tempted.

Thanks to everyone for all the help!

-Joel