After some mucking about I am rapidly coming to the same conclusion.  It'll
be worth putting the effort in getting the infrastructure since I want to
try an install on some other machines later anyway.

I'll start to work though this step by step -- I may be back...

Thanks

David 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dunc [mailto:dunc@lemonia.org] 
Sent: 13 May 2005 15:24
To: Michael-John Turner
Cc: David Ross; NetBSD sparc
Subject: Re: Fallen at the first hurdle...

Michael-John Turner wrote:

>On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 02:38:05PM +0100, David Ross wrote:
>  
>
>>"Cannot load netbsd: error=79"
>>    
>>
>
>If my understanding is correct, this is "Inappropriate file type or
>format". Probably a bad floppy or floppy drive.
>
>  
>
>>I've tried to goggle this, but the only things similar seem to relate too
>>the root disk, which suggested that maybe this is a floppy read error?
>>    
>>
>
>After waisting too many hours (and cursing too much), I've decided to never
>try and boot Suns from floppy again. It may take a few hours to configure,
>but it's well worth your while to setup an environment to network boot
>them. Follow the instructions in the installation guide and you should be
>all set.
>
>-mj
>  
>
Just don't use floppies anymore ever, they are just too unreliable.

As Michael says, especially with suns, just netboot them.

tcpdump is your friend for troubleshooting the rarp and tftp servers.

Dunc