Thanks for all the replies. We'll use the "setenv floppy-boot? true" next time.
Some people asked about the crashes we had. It was when we moved a set of SCSI disks onto a 740 from a 230, having first renamed the volume on the old 230 to be called "old". The 740 also had some FCAL disks, although it didn't make any difference to the crash whether or not they were connected.
We booted the 740 with 5.2.2P1 in maintenance mode (in order to sort out the volume names) from floppy with the old disks plugged into the new differential SCSI shelf. The sequence was:
vol status
raid_checklabels(0): disk 8a.0 has serialno 0016784334 but system has serialno 0016792113 raid_checklabels(0): disk 8a.0 has serialno 0016784334 but system has serialno 0016792113 raid_checklabels(1): disk 8a.0 has serialno 0016784334 but system has serialno 0016792113 raid_checklabels(1): disk 8a.0 has serialno 0016784334 but system has serialno 0016792113 raid_checklabels(2): disk 8a.0 has serialno 0016784334 but system has serialno 0016792113 raid_checklabels(2): disk 8a.0 has serialno 0016784334 but system has serialno 0016792113 No root volume found. You must specify a root volume with "vol options <volname> root" before rebooting the system. Volume State Status Options old offline foreign
vol online old
PANIC: MM fault MMCSR=1, type=0, VA=0x128, PC=0xfffffc 00003b967c
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This was quite repeatable. The trick we evenually discovered was to disconnect the FCAL shelf, do a "boot without /etc/rc" so that it gave the message about "discarding the NVRAM contents", and made the volume available instead of labelling it "foreign".
Dave Atkin ------------------------------------------------------ Dave Atkin, Head of Technical Services Computing Service, University of York, YORK YO10 5DD Phone: +44-1904-433804 (ddi) Fax: +44-1904-433740 Email: D.Atkin@york.ac.uk ------------------------------------------------------