Possibly silly NetBSD on A3000 question....

[Dalamar]

I have a feeling I'm missing something obvious, but I need to ask for help as I'm at wits end.  I have an A3000D standard config (except the ram is 16 and 2MB) and I'm trying to load NetBSD 1.6 on it.  I have created the swap and root drives as indicated on the installation instructions, and I've copied the source files to an AmigaDOS partition where I'm trying to load miniroot from.  When I run the xstreamtodev to load the miniroot into swap the percent counter only gets to 4% and the thing drops me back at the Workbench Shell prompt as though everything is succesful.  Just out of curiousity I rebooted to the swap partition and let the miniroot load, after a brief amount of activity at the loader screen, the screen blanks and the system just sits there with a dark screen.  I can only assume that it's because of an incomplete miniroot load.  What am I missing?  Help!   :-?  The swap partition is at the beginning of the disk (at least according to HDToolbox) and it's 100MB so I can't believe it's too small.  Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.  I'm getting rather frustrated.

[koaftder]

I just puttogether an amiga 3000 system with the intention of putting netbsd on it. I only have 4mb of fast ram though ): Im waiting on a better deal for the memory. I found a couple of warehouse places selling the zip dram chips, but they all wanted insane ammounts of money for them. The cheapest i found was 50 euros for *each* chip! And they wont even talk to you unless your going to buy $1000 worth of product.

Why are these chips so hard to procure for a descent ammount of money? They were manufactured by like 10 different companies over a period of 10 years or something.

[Dalamar]

Software Hut has them for $4 US per chip.  I bought them from there.  They were helpful in replacing one that was bad also.  
http://www.softhut.com

[MrZammler]

The percent indicator is normal. It just shows how much of the disk space the miniroot file has occupied in the partition.

Do you have any more info on why the miniroot has stoped booting? Messages, etc?

[Dalamar]

OK.  I was wondering if that was what the percentage was.  There are no messages, it just goes from the initial grey screen with black text, to blank.   It's almost like it's changing graphics modes or something.  I'll try to post more details this evening like the values displayed on the screen just prior.

[Dalamar]

OK>  More detail...

At the Boot: prompt I take the default of netbsd -ASn2
Loading netbsd: =0x2a8b88
1904563+80924+379084 [283904+131108]=0x2a8b88

*** Loading from 07D3E384 to Fastmem 0700000 ***

At this point the screen clears and goes black.  I've left it like this for at least 10 minutes and nothing ever happens.

[Dalamar]

Anyone?

[MrZammler]

This is just the part where the kernel should be loaded, and start to execute.

I'm guessing that NetBSD tries to open a screenmode that you cant display. Do you have a gfx card on your machine?

One of the switches in the boot prompt, indicates whether it should open a dblpal or not screen, IIRC.

On the other hand, if you dont hear any hard disk activity, it could be something totally diferent.

Check with the NetBSD Amiga mailing list.

[Dalamar]

No disk activity and no graphics card.  I'll post to the mailing list.  Thanks for trying.