Hi,
Unfortunately newfs fails making the filesystems. It seems to fail on both my disks so I don't think it is necessarily a disk error. I'm going to be forced to try an install using the traditional method. :(
The MacOS newfs program has been known to have some issues. If you can boot an older install kernel, you can newfs from there.
If I compile an '030-only test kernel, would you be willing to give it a try?
John