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From: torben@uhmanoa.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: panic: iinit on booting 4.3bsd miniroot, VAX 11/750
Message-ID: <273@uhmanoa.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 17-Aug-87 04:12:57 EDT
Article-I.D.: uhmanoa.273
Posted: Mon Aug 17 04:12:57 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Aug-87 01:52:51 EDT
References: <8799@brl-adm.ARPA> <7986@mimsy.UUCP> <6882@dartvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: torben@uhmanoa.ics.hawaii.edu (Torben Nielsen)
Organization: University of Hawaii at Manoa
Lines: 43

In article <6882@dartvax.UUCP> steve@dartvax.UUCP (Steve Campbell) writes:
>In article <8799@brl-adm.ARPA> mullen@nrl-css.arpa (Preston Mullen) writes:
>>Trying to bring up 4.3bsd on a VAX 11/750, I booted vmunix from the
>>miniroot on disk ra0; upon specifying ra0* as my root device, I got an
>>immediate panic: iinit.  
>
>...and a good way for this to happen is by trying to use the 4.2bsd
>standalone copy program from the 4.2 distribution cassette.  When our
>4.3 package arrived, Berkeley had not enclosed a cassette, presumably
>because we were already known to be running 4.2.  I tried using the 4.2
>cassette and got the iinit panic.  I grumbled and resorted to manually
>bootstrapping the miniroot.  See Appendix B of "Installing &
>Operating."  That worked.
>						Steve Campbell
>						Dartmouth College

I had that problem when trying to upgrade a 780 from 4.2BSD to 4.3BSD about a
year ago.

I kept running into the panic and I was stumped for a couple of hours. The
problem occurs because there was a change in the layout of the RA81 disks
between 4.2BSD and 4.3BSD. This problem only affected RA81's. Bootstrapping
manually is one possible solution. However, if you happen to have at least
two RA81's (and many who have RA81's do since they got them as package deals
from DEC), there's another way.

Say you have drives ra0 and ra1. Use the 4.2BSD standalone copy program to copy
the miniroot to ra1(0,0) and boot that up. When asked for the root partition,
just answer ra1 (NO asterisk). This will give you a running miniroot on the
second RA81. Now use the miniroot to load the real root onto ra0(0,0) and
reboot. You can now proceed with a normal installation. As soon as you can get
to it, make yourself a new floppy (or cassettte as the case may be) and you're
ok.

There are some warnings to people with RA81's in the documentation. But there's
no procedure for overcoming the problem.

					Torben N. Nielsen
					University of Hawaii