On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, Murray Stokely wrote:

> On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, Andrei Petrov wrote:
> % Does anything work at all? ls, ps, cat?
> 
>   I believe I could cd and echo *.  I don't seem to remember ls even
> being on the disk but I could be mistaken.

Yea, shell works, sysinst too.

> 
> % I don't think ramdisk.fs's kernel has memory disk in it.
> 
>   I didn't see it listed in the bootup message, and I can't choose
> 'md*' for a root partition.
> 
> % What I think is happenning is that newfs and mount just coredump.
> % And that explains message 'file system full'. No space for core.
> 
>   I told NetBSD that I didn't want to specify a dump disk for core
> files.  I asummed this would mean it wouldn't generate core dumps
> but instead it could mean that the core dumps are generated on the
> same filesystem that the binary is executed from?

Dump disk is for kernel core only, so it doesn't make any difference
when application crashes. Core should be written in current directory
which is in root in your case. So don't worry specifying dump device
that won't change anything.

> 
> % Is that possible that you don't have enought memory installed? How
> % much do you have? How much is available? you can check that in messages
> 
>   256 megabytes.
> 
> % I don't know an easy way to test what is in ramdisk.fs, I'll check that.
> % 
> % You can try to do installation from solaris. Not sure if
> % netbsd will work with solaris's ffs but I'd give it a try. The sequence
> % should be pretty much the same. Just do it from solaris.
> 
>   I've tried that.  The method of installation isn't the problem.  The
> problem is with ramdisk.fs on my system.  I've yet to here anyone
> tell me they've succeeded with ramdisk.fs and I think thats the
> problem.
> 

What I meant to say that you can try to do manual installation _under_
solaris, i.e. having solaris running you prepare disk by solaris'
newfs, mount. Then untar netbsd's sets there(kern.tgz, base.tgz and
etc.tgz should be enought for try). You should make that disk bootable
and try to boot netbsd from it. Don't know if /etc/MAKEDEV will work
properly, if not you will need to create devices manullly.
You will need /dev/console and /dev/[r]st1[a-h], may be more.
Make sure you have console.
What I don't know is how different netbsd's and solaris' ffs are.
If netbsd can (at least) read from solaris's ffs than
you will have pretty much everything needed to re-install using netbsd.
I'd reinstall to avoid possible ffs incompatibilities.

Netboot is fairly simple if you have another unixbox nearby.

--
	Andrey