At 05:31 PM 8/22/98 -0400, you wrote:
>Greetings. If this isn't the right list to ask this to,
>please point me in the right direction.
>
>I've just spent hours trying to 1.3.2 installed on my 3/60.
>The machine ran fine under StunOS 4.1.1 (as far as that goes), but
>it was time for something more modern. It's got 20MB of RAM and
>a 350MB Quantum Lightning 350MB SCSI-II hard disk, the color
>option, console and whatnot.
>
>While running through the install steps
>I discovered that the miniroot was not properly copied
>onto the swap partition from SunOS, but of course I'd already
>repartitioned the disks. So next I got it to boot off my linux
>laptop (planning and NFS install) and tried copying the miniroot
>again. This resulted in a kernel panic complaining about DMA timeouts
>or somesuch - it goes by really fast. I tried this several times
>with no luck. Next I pulled the disk off the sun and plugged it
>into my pcmcia SCSI card on the laptop, used dd to copy the miniroot
>onto the swap partition, and stuck it back on the Sun. Now I can
>successfully boot to the install program from the swap partition, but
>I get two errors. First, it won't write to /tmp/filesystems, complaining
>about a read-only filesystem. I've booted both with and without the -s
>switch (does that do anything?). Next, if I try to run newfs manually
>I get the DMA SCSI error again and everything reboots. Why did this
>work fine under SunOS but craps out now? help! I've reduced a happy
>sun3/60 to a useless piece of scrap!
>Thanks.
>
>	-Ethan
>

Hello Ethan.  

Sorry you are having troubles.  I had troubles getting my Sun 3/80 to use
netBSD.  In the end, it turned out to be improperly allocated partitions.  I
don't know if this is related to your problems or not, but there seems to be
some serious lack of documentation in the area of partitioning disks.  I
found out that the installation was getting to a point where it was
overwriting data in a partition that overlapped my swap partition (or some
such) and I think I may have been getting errors similar to the ones you've
mentioned.  It's been awhile since I had this problem and I eventually got
it straightened out, and now my machine has been fine for the last 10
months.  I'm tempted to upgrade to 1.3.2 and see what's new, but I'm also
somewhat apprehensive of the whole process.

Make sure that your partitions are sane.  I don't remember what I did
exactly to screw mine up, or what I did to fix it so I can't be of much more
help.  I can only show you what the "edlabel" dump gives for my partition
scheme:

        type_num: 4
        sub_type: 0
       type_name: SCSI disk
       pack_name: fictitious
    bytes/sector: 512
   sectors/track: 82
 tracks/cylinder: 8
       cylinders: 3117
sectors/cylinder: 656
partition      start         (c/t/s)      nblks         (c/t/s)  type

 a (root)     179744     (274/00/00)    1865008    (2843/00/00)  4.2BSD
 b (swap)        656       (1/00/00)     179087     (272/07/81)* swap
 c (disk)          0       (0/00/00)    2044752    (3117/00/00)  unknown
 d (user)          0       (0/00/00)          0       (0/00/00)  unused
 e (user)          0       (0/00/00)          0       (0/00/00)  unused
 f (user)          0       (0/00/00)          0       (0/00/00)  unused
 g (user)          0       (0/00/00)          0       (0/00/00)  unused
 h (user)          0       (0/00/00)          0       (0/00/00)  unused
edlabel> 

Hope this helps.