On Sun, Nov 06, 2005 at 05:52:51PM -0700, Roy Bixler wrote:
> > Did the kernel print some error message in dmesg or /var/log/messages ?
> 
> I just tried again and found that there are no "dmesg" messages when
> doing a failed "newfs" command.  To further rule out hardware
> problems, I did "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd0b bs=8k" under NetBSD and
> "e2fsck -cc /dev/sda2" under Linux.  Both were successful.

Could you try using the 2.1 kernel but the 2.0.2 newfs binary,
and 2.1 newfs binary with 2.0.2 kernel ?
As you seem to imply that this happens since your 2.1 upgrade,
this would allow to check if it's kernel or userland related (the
2.0.2 kernel should run without much trouble a 2.1 userland, as I don't
think there was major interface changes in syscalls between 2.0 and 2.1)

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--