> > Success!
> > 
> > I got NetBSD-1.4.1 loaded last night.
> > 
> > As it turns out, it was a problem with the Seagate 3610N drives (RZ25L).
> > They would not take a newfs.  I swapped Quantum RZ25L's and they worked
> > fine.  Anyone know if there are any particular jumper or other settings
> > on the Seagate RZ25Ls that would give rise to such a problem?  Maybe
> 
> They were spinning, were they? I mean that they might have been set to
> wait for a SCSI spinup command.
> 
> Long shot..

Yeah, they spun up ok, and I also invoked a show dev to make sure they
were spinning before booting.  In either case, the Seagate drives
spun up, install disklabelled them, and did the first partition,
then errored out with a write error on the second partition.
Root was only 64mb or something like that on 550mb drives.
Swap was 128mb or something like that.  The d partition was
the rest of the drive.

Swapping drives (on 2 Alphas), curred the problems.  I sense there
is something written to the drives that may be causing the failure
to do the d partition newfs.  But, I dunno what, exactly, yet.

I will try a VAX llfmt on them and see if that clears anything.
If not, I will move the drives over to the VAXen and put fresh
drives from the VAXen on the Alphas.

The things we do to make our toyz play Unix.....

And the next song and dance routine is.....(:+\\.....

Bob