[TUHS] Bringing up any 4.3BSD on a MicroVAX without tape....

Hello to the list, from a lurker, supposedly retired, but.... having run across one last MVIII crate for a lowly buck, in surplus..... you know the rest. It just has to run some form of ancient BSD again.....(:+}}..... Anyway, it is sans tape, and all my TK50 cartridges have decomposed to dusty oxide, so it will have be resurrected from something other than tape. As luck has it, it has a scsi controller, and I happened to have a scsi floppy from a decishbox long since gone to the great bit crusher in the sky. So, with some prodding it booted off a NetBSD 1.4.1 vax floppy and was made to run NetBSD 1.4.3 as a starter, to get the rest of the early BSD bits onto the machine. After making fsck trip all over itself, and pushing some Tahoe and Reno bits onto it, it now RUNS Tahoe (q0c variety) or Reno (archive variety) quite happily. The problem is that it won't install boot blocks that work. None of the raboot/rdboot/bootra/bootrd combos get any farther than the cryptic "loading boot" message. The machine locks up hard then. Yet, I can boot and run things fine off a NetBSD 1.1A VAX tk50 boot file ("stand") dd'd to that lonely scsi floppy off the far end of the bus, with the usual b/3 duaX.... followed by "ra0a" as the root and ^D to multiuser baby. Years ago, the first time around, I had this working fine, but, when I backed up the then running system, I forgot (like a dummy) to dd off a set of working boot blocks or a working bootable root. Ahh, stupid me.....(:+}}..... The nearest that I can tell is that it is not writing (using the disklabel executable) a correct set of block addresses to find the real /boot and kernel. Once, however done, the kernel is actually loaded, it runs fine (like off NetBSD tape boot "stand"). Any of you old timers got any thoughts as to where my suite is going afoul of the real way? It is probably something quite simple, but, my greymatters just can't seem to get it figured out. Any insights are appreciated. Thanks! Bob Keys Olde Pfarte with too many VAXentoyz.....(:+}}.....