There's a bug in the MacOS installer that prevents it from working 
with large hard drives.  In the past I've copied the tar files over 
to the netbsd partition in the command line part of the installer 
after getting a minimal install in place so I could boot single user 
and finish the install in netbsd, as per the instructions in the FAQ:

http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/mac68k/faq/faq-4.html#ss4.12

I recently installed 1.6 on my Quadra 650 using sysinst on a 9GB 
drive and it worked fine.  Any reason why you're not using 1.6 and 
sysinst?

At 8:51 AM +0100 1/15/03, Anders, Peter wrote:

>Hallo,
>
>I am trying to install NETBSD1.5 on my oldfashion Mac LCII (running OS7.5).
>It shall be installed on an external Harddisk (9Mb Seagate SCSI id.1).
>Everything run fine (Partitioning with HD SC Setup with patch; mkfs) -
>until here no problems.
>
>Then I started the Installer. First steps run okay (Build Devices). Also
>installing Sets (Base.tgz,.etc) started well. But when "Base.tgz" was ca.
>90% ready following messages were generated to the Installer-window:
>
>-r--r--r--     0/0          8293 Sat Nov 18 05:29 2000 ./usr/lkm/mfs.o
>-r--r--r--     0/0         42230 Sat Nov 18 05:29 2000 ./usr/lkm/msdosfs.o
>-r--r--r--     0/0         30442 Sat Nov 18 05:29 2000 ./usr/lkm/ntfs.o
>-r--r--r--     0/0          3799 Sat Nov 18 05:29 2000 ./usr/lkm/nullfs.o
>-r--r--r--     0/0          3759 Sat Nov 18 05:29 2000 ./usr/lkm/overlay.o
>-r--r--r--     0/0          8746 Sat Nov 18 05:29 2000 ./usr/lkm/portal.o
>-r--r--r--     0/0         17110 Sat Nov 18 05:29 2000 ./usr/lkm/procfs.o
>-r--r--r--     0/0          7613 Sat Nov 18 05:29 2000 ./usr/lkm/umapfs.o
>drwxr-xr-x     0/0             0 Sat Oct 21 18:04 2000 ./usr/local
>drwxr-xr-x     0/0             0 Sat Oct 21 18:04 2000 ./usr/local/bin
>drwxr-xr-x     0/0             0 Sat Oct 21 18:04 2000 ./usr/local/lib
>drwxr-xr-x     0/0             0 Sat Oct 21 18:04 2000 ./usr/local/libdata
>drwxr-xr-x     0/0             0 Sat Oct 21 18:04 2000 ./usr/local/libexec
>drwxr-xr-x     0/0             0 Sat Oct 21 18:04 2000 ./usr/local/man
>
>Error on SCSIRead(), # 5
>Error on SCSIWrite(), # 5
>Error on SCSIRead(), # 5
>Error on SCSIRead(), # 5
>Error on SCSIWrite(), # 5
>Error on SCSIRead(), # 5
>pos = 0, i = 78, fs = /
>alloccgblk: can't find blk in cyl
>
>I tried it couple of times with the same result.
>
>Can you explain it? What shall I do?
>
>Best regards and thank You for your efford.
>Peter Anders