Re: NetBSD/vax

[David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Tue, 17 Mar 2020 at 04:10, Rod Smallwood
<rodsmallwood52%btinternet.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> With the upcoming demise of VMS/VAX I thought I might give NetBSD/vax a try.
>
> Downloading a bootable image and burning it onto a CD was not a problem.
>
> On the 3100 with attached RRD42 and SCSI drive RZ26l the CD duly booted
> ito the NetBSD install menu.
>
> All of versions 7,8 and 9. failed after partitioning at the point where
> the system is copied to the hard disk.

Do you recall what errors were shown? Was it relating to a disk
timeout or similar?

I definitely installed NetBSD-6 onto a 4000/90A - had it running as a
web server & NFS server for a diskless Dreamcast (
http://netbsd0.blogspot.com/2012/06/retrocomputing-with-vamp-stack-vax.html
)

Would you be willing to try testing NetBSD6 & maybe even 5 to see if
they work on your hardware? If one does we could try to bisect to
determine when the problem was introduced.

Also as another test would you be willing to try formatting and
installing by hand? You should be able to drop out of the installer to
a shell and then something like (from memory)

# dhcpcd
(auto configure network if not already done)
# disklabel -i sd0
(interactive disklabel tool - for testing you could just create a
single partition "a" for up to 2GB)
# newfs sd0a
# mount -o async /dev/sd0a /mnt
# cd /mnt
# ftp ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-9.0/vax/binary/sets/
   mget *
   quit
# for f in *tgz ; do
   tar xzpf $f
   done
# installboot /dev/sd0a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1 /

David