First of all, I can't seem to find the boot block on the rx33 miniroot. 
It seems that /usr/mdec is empty.  I tried to use /boot, but:
disklabel: Bootstrap doesn't leave room for disk label
It wants a really small file here.  I tried FTP searching for this
thing, but I can't find it.

Also, how does NetBSD deal with bad sectors?  I'm afraid that it has no
clue.  I entered the full size of the RD53 as it is listed in the
Micropolis 1325 specs.  If I hadn't it would be changed anyways by
NetBSD to the actual size.
When creating file systems, I get a few messages like:
command 0x5d completed with status 0x30
command 0xa0 completed with status 0x30
These are always in the same place.  Does this mean it hit a bad sector?
newfs doesn't seem to have a "do a surface scan" option.  I know that
the test 70 format on the VS2000 does indeed find bad blocks and
redirect them.  However I can't see how NetBSD can be paying attention
to that if it is using the whole disk.  The format actually sets aside a
portion for replacements.

-- 
|  Boris Gjenero <bgjenero@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>              |
|  Home page:  http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~bgjenero/     |
|  "Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to   |
|  depend greatly on our own point of view." - Obi-Wan Kenobi, ROTJ  |