> 
> On Mon, 1 Mar 1999 rdkeys@unity.ncsu.edu wrote:
> 
> > I have this ancient sparc dinosaur (old vme 12 slot crate with an early
> > sparc cpu in it).  My sunos tapes are full of hard errors, so I thought
> > I would try loading up netbsd.  I used the dead sunos tape to boot and
> > load the miniroot onto swap, and then booted of that fine.  Alas, after
> > coming up, the netbsd 1.3.3 sparc would not read anything I put into
> > the mt02 archive tape drive.  Interestingly, I pulled the CPU, and put
> > in a sun 3/160 cpu, and loaded up netbsd, and it worked fine.
> > 
> > Anyone know why the sparc suite will not read the tape, yet the sun3
> > suite does fine, on the same hardware?  I hope my sparc is not too
> > early for netbsd......(:+{{.....
> > 
> 	It should be supported by NetBSD - my guess is you have a
> 	sun4/260?

Just thinking out loud.... is the early mt02 controller compiled into
the sparc kernel?

> > Anyone know of a set of tape building scripts for building a sparc
> > tape boot set, like on the sun3?  I cobbled some together, but they
> > did not seem to be exactly what was needed.  Surely someone has done
> > this kind of thing or the early sparcs?
> > 
> 	Possibly not - most people seem to have access to a network
> 	interface and netboot their suns. If you get anything working
> 	then please pass it back to be added to the tree :)

It really needs to be mirrored in the say way as the sun3 suite where
tape installation is set up.  The early (aka dinosaur) sparcs install
that way.  (Yeah, I know some of us Luddites need to move into the
20th century, but what the heck, it is a nice coole dude machine and
has easy space to work on inside, and it also keeps the basement warm
in winter).

My solution for testing was to use the sunos 4.1 sparc boot tape
(mine was nuked about half way through but enough was there to force
tape booting to miniroot kernel and a dd to swap).  I used it to
format and setup the partitions, then dd'd an image of the NetBSD
miniroot into the swap partition then booted off of that.
It came up OK, and set up the drives, but it would not even begin
to read anything from the mt02/archive 1/4 inch cartridge streamer.
Yet, the sun3 suite did fine.  I am really expecting there may be
no mt02 support in the sparc kernel as it is built now.  Anyone
able to check or confirm that?

> 	Do you have any other external SCSI tape drives on which you
> 	could test? It _might_ just be a problem with that type of drive.

My cobbled together controller (sun3 si controller in a sun2 frame
so it gets both internal and external scsi bus lines) works fine in
the sun3 suite.  It seemed to work fine in the sparc suite except
for the tape controller.  I tried ftping stuff and manually installing
but it did not quite work (stupidity on my part perhaps).  Close though.

> 	I back up my sparc via DAT, so tapes definitely work to some
> 	extent :)

DAT... wasdat?.....(:+{{..... too new for a vme crate.....(:+{{...
Mebbie a xylogics or tapemaster.....(:+}}....

> 		David/absolute

IS ANYONE in the group actually runing sparc vme hardware on NetBSD
(4/2xx or 4/4xx hardware?).

Thanks

Bob Keys