OK, did a little research, found some older mentions of the problem in mail 
archives. I apparently have a disk that does not like the current scsi driver. 

Since I have tried both the generic and genericsbc kernel may I assume that I 
cannot install netbsd on this mschine so long as I use this disk?

Or should I try the 1.5_BETA2 first before I give up? I did not see any 
mention of the scsi driver being updated between 1.4.2 and 1.5, is it worth my 
effort?