Looks to be the power supply in the external disk box sagging under the 
weight of the Cheetah drive.  It wants 2+ Amps at startup....

Turning on the delayed start didn't help...

I'm now looking for a small cheap power supply to replace the current on in 
the external box...

At 12:01 PM 10/10/2002 -0700, Don Yuniskis wrote:
> > "Tony 'Nicoya' Mantler" <nicoya@apia.dhs.org> said:
> > At 10:12 AM -0500 10/10/02, Steven Grunza wrote:
> > >I've run out of disk space too many times and have added a 9GB Cheetah
> > >drive to my work system but I'm getting a strange "drive offline" message
> > >and "Operation not supported by device" messages.  Any one have any
>clues?
> > [...]
> >
> > Is the drive spinning up? Almost all drives will have a jumper to disable
> > spinup-on-poweron. (alternatley, there may not be enough power available
>at
> > boot to spin up the drive, cheetahs are very power-hungry drives)
> >
> > With that jumper enabled, the host will have to sent a start unit command
> > to the drive to get the platters spinning before any other operations can
> > take place.
> >
> > Some OSes will automatically send a start unit command when the drive is
> > offline, and some won't. I don't know which category NetBSD falls into, as
> > there's no real 'correct' behaviour in this situation.
>
>In my experience (1.5.2) NetBSD sends START UNIT to each
>drive during the probe() for each device.  The SPARC should
>send START UNIT to whichever drive you are booting from
>(else NetBSD never gets a chance to probe() for the others  :> )
>
>Also make sure entries exist for the device under /dev
>
>--don