Someone please save my sanity!

My work on making the SCSI board work in the new system (for those of you
following my trials and tribulations in this respect) is temporarily on
hiatus because I have had another disk failure on the old system, so task
#1 has been to recover the data and get the old system back on its feet.

I ended up buying an IDE disk (much cheaper than SCSI!), and copying
my data onto it.  In fact, I now have two copies of the O/S (not
counting the one on the flakey SCSI disk sd1):

  copy #1:  root  sd0e
  (SCSI)    usr   sd0g
            root  sd0a  <- this one lets the system boot from the
                           bootblocks, but I specify "boot
                           sd0e:netbsd" at the boot prompt and it
                           seems to do the right thing:
                             boot device: sd0
                             root on sd0e dumps on sd0b
                           I am going to put 1.5.2 on sd0a/sd0f when I
                           have time, which is why 1.4.1 is in a weird
                           place.  Both sd0a and sd0e have a 1.4.1
                           root filesystem for now.

  copy #2: root wd0a
  (IDE)    usr  wd0e
                          this copy will not boot properly.  When I
                          specify "boot wd0a:netbsd", or even "boot
                          wd0a:netbsd.generic" at the boot prompt, I
                          get:
                            boot device sd0
                            root on sd0a dumps on sd0b
                          I even tried doing the initial part of the
                          boot from floppy, then asking for a boot
                          from wd0a: still the same.

I am going nuts.  *Why* is this system's initial boot code apparently
agreeing to boot from my IDE disk (wd0), then sneakily booting from my
SCSI disk (sd0)???


Anne.
-- 
Ms. Anne Bennett, Senior Analyst, IITS, Concordia University, Montreal H3G 1M8
anne@alcor.concordia.ca                                        +1 514 848-7606