[TUHS] Got old MVII critter and wanna bring up a 4.3BSD family thingy.....but no tape..

[TUHS] Got old MVII critter and wanna bring up a 4.3BSD family thingy.....but no tape..

[Robertdkeys]

Having fallen into that trap of another one dollar vax.....of the
Qbus variety, and, wanting to try to bring up another round of
some sort of 4.3BSD related thingy, but, with no tape drive or
tape cartridges, can anyone come up with a dd'able root image
that is known to work on an MVII critter, AND, have a footprint
of 1mb or less (i.e., a disklabel of only 1mb size or less)?
Sadly, all my tapes have decomposed to dust, and I am down
to one questionable TK50 tape drive.  I can get a boot of the
Quasijarus boot, off a floppy, but it won't read a miniroot that
was dd'd onto a swap partition correctly.  I can boot a NetBSD
1.4.1 and work back to a NetBSD-1.0A which is usable to
unroll file systems onto a drive, but, it won't boot the kernel
correctly into a 4.3BSDish system.  I still need the correct
boot blocks and boots.  I did try an image from vaxpower's
root, and that booted and ran mostly OK, but, it had a label
set up for a 4 gig drive, and my controller has early enough
proms that it won't handle anything larger than a 1 gb drive.
I tried a couple of other images from here and there, but the
boot blocks are not quite right to run on my vax.  So, anyone
have handy a dd'able root with boot blocks, set up for a 1gb
or smaller drive, that is known to work on an MVII critter for
some flavor of 4.3BSD (4.3, Tahoe, Reno, Quasijarus) that
I could use to get my machine up?  The only constraints
on the image are that it must have a label set up for a 1gb
or smaller drive, and it must have a usable ftp from usr/bin
dropped into bin, so I can ftp in the rest of the system after
booting up the root image.

One other thought might be to create a bootable dd image with
a root only system that contains all the requisite user bits on
say a 100mb or so root file system.  That is non-standard,
from the traditionalists point of view, but, at least the system
would come up essentially running, and complete.  It could
then be partitioned and cloned off onto a standardly partitioned
drive, as a next step.

Like a fool, the last time I ran the system, about 5 years ago,
I religiously copied off all the bits onto cd, except for a dd'able
boot/root image... drat!  Kick, Kick, Kick... etc.....(:+{{.....

Any pointers to such an image, or anyone that has a system
up that might create me such an image, would be greatly
appreciated.  With the EOL of many tapes at hand, I suspect
that it may be the only good way to bring up a 4.3BSDish
system on a Qbus box, and we might should save up a such
usable image in the TUHS archives.

Thanks

Bob Keys
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[TUHS] Got old MVII critter and wanna bring up a 4.3BSD family thingy.....but no tape..

[Tom Ivar Helbekkmo]

Robertdkeys at aol.com writes:

> Any pointers to such an image, or anyone that has a system up that
> might create me such an image, would be greatly appreciated.

Why not install a virtual system, using simh on some modern Unix, and
then use that to create the particular image you want?

-tih
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