> but that's happening after the kernel is loaded.....

Well, it is the transition from tape kernel to drive kernels where the
problem is.  The tape boots, OK, and loads the ramdisk kernel, but,
the ramdisk kernel does not spin up the drives.  It hangs where it probes
the scsi.  That is where a reset or something is needed to force the
drives to spin up.  Sunos, however it does it, does issue something
that spins the DEC drives up, that NetBSD is lacking.

Loading the miniroot from a sunos tape does spin up the drives,
and loads NetBSD correctly.  Alas, it requires sunos formatting of
the drive (which takes forever and a day), before it will write a
miniroot to HD swap, every time NetBSD is loaded.

The problem seems to be in the ramdisk kernel drivers, AFIK.
They don't spin up the drive(s), any of them.  Sunos does.
After NetBSD is loaded, it seems to do fine, IFF the drives are
hardwired to spin up on power up, in my crates.  The DEC drives
can't be set to spin up on power up, by jumper, but require loading
up ultrix and doing some other funniness.  IFF NetBSD would just
issue whatever commands sunos does, the problem would be solved.
By the way the tapes and everything else on the bus are acting,
I do sense it is a full bus reset, to clear the scsi bus, that
sunos is doing.

.....

> then I smacked my forehead as I realised that if the first stage boot

Easy on the head smacking.....(:+}}... brainpower is easily lost into
the great bit bucket in the sky.....

Bob