Just a followup on my earlier msg, it seems
the stalling is probably normal (old CD drive),
but the error and debugger actually, when I ran
the extracts from the command line, was an NMI
interrupt.

Apparently in sysinst, it was showing me the
output from the debugger (ie, where it stopped
and the debug prompt) but not the original
"NMI Interrupt" error.  Would have been a help
for a new user to see that msg in sysinst...
(how many new users are going to go past the
sysinst installer when it fails and try doing
a newfs and extracting the sets manually?).

Anyways, on to figuring out why any memory in
the 2nd 512M fails, but works in the first 512M.