On Wed, 14 Apr 1999, Steve Revilak wrote:

> masaya@iwate-u.ac.jp (Masaya SATO) writes:
> 
> >Everything had seemed to be going well until I booted for the second time.
> >>After a while I rebooted, the SyQuest drive suddenly started accessing
> >itself >and the OS got stuck with the message "bad block" and lots of HEX
> >codes.

It might simply be a bad blocks, like it says. SyQuest type media is
notoriously unreliable. I would try a different cartridge, or try
re-formatting that one, before giving up altogether.

> My first attempt at an install (back with 1.3) involved a syquest drive (EZ
> drive).  My errors were different from yours -- "esp0 .... ", but the
> nutshell synopsis is that the drive would basically trash itself on a
> continuous basis.  After a few days, there would be enough gone that I'd
> have to reinstall the system.
> 
> Others have had similar problems (similar to mine, not the one you
> describe).  Unless I've missed something, there is still some aspect of
> removable media that doesn't agree that well with NetBSD's SCSI driver.

For about a year there, before 1.3, I was running NetBSD off of a
NOMAI SyQuest compatable drive, and then I was using it for scratch
for an even longer time. I suspect there's nothing wrong with
removables, in principle, it's just that the media is so unreliable.
It's even possible to "eject disk sd1a", insert another, and mount the
new one, as long as there was no swap mounted on the first. (I never
tried that with the root disk, either.)

> Perhaps others may shed better light on your problem specifically.  IMHO,
> you'll be better off installing to a regual (eg -- non-removable) hard
> drive.

There was always that long pause at boot-up, when you never knew what
was going to happen, but once the drive was probed the system would be
stable. I did get to see more interesting SCSI error messages than
you'd ever want to see, mostly along the lines of "...BLOCK
REPLACED...".