Fellow vaxophiles:

Since I couldn't get 1.2beta to run my my uVAX II,  I thought I'd go 
back and get 1.1A running again.  I had a full backup of my 1.1A system 
on TK50, so I think to myself, "just get enough of something running to have 
disklabel, newfs, and restore and it'll be easy to restore from the
tapes."   ;-)

The 1.2beta miniroot was out of the question, since it crashes shortly
after boot, so I start looking around for 1.1A binaries, only to find 
that they've been deleted from every NetBSD archive I could find.  I kept
hoping to find a mirror that was out-of-sync...

Fortunately, I dug up a copy of a 1.1A boot tape I made some months ago.
I used it to label the disk and put a miniroot in the swap partition.
I boot up the miniroot and find, much to my dismay, that "restore" isn't
in the miniroot.  

Desperate, I scoured several systems I use for development here and 
much to my surprise, turned up a complete set of 1.0A binaries.  So
I extract sbin.tar.gz and etc.tar.gz from the 1.1A miniroot, into an
unused partition.  I run the 1.0A restore from the 1.1A miniroot and 
(somewhat pessimistic from my experience thus far) fully expect that restore 
will utterly fail to restore my tapes.  ;-)  With great pleasure, I'm 
pleased to report that the 1.0A restore actually did restore all of my 
partitions from tape, no problem.  I rebooted the system into 1.1A from
my newly-restored partitions and it was completely back to normal.

Two things I'd like to suggest:

1.	Include "restore" on the miniroot.  It's only 158K or so, and
	would turn the miniroot into a nice, easy way to restore a broken
	system. (I suppose I could have used tar to back up my system, 
	but tar makes it less convenient to restore a handful of files 
	when needed.)

2.	While a new release is in beta, can we continue to provide 
	binaries for the older release?  At least one other uVAX II
	owner has been unable to run 1.2beta, and has no alternative
	system to run.
	
-- 
Carl Harris
Systems Engineer
CNS Research and Planning, Virginia Tech
ceharris@vt.edu