Hmm, never got the "char-special dev" error (did you try the raw dev. 
instead?) but I fixed the prob by dl'ing the current src-tars from 
ftp.netbsd.org and recompiling newfs, kernal, and all the rest ;)  
Incidentally it may simply have been a bad disk, because after all that I 
tried a plain newfs /dev/fd1a again, and again it accesses the drive and 
paused, but this time started writing tracks, superblocks etc after a few 
seconds.  As a bonus fsck and mount_ados work better now too ;)  Now if I 
can just get my GVP controller to newfs and/or format my Zip drive... 
right now it seems to recognize it and gets correct disk info from the 
RDB, but when I try a newfs I get "device not configured" error... maybe 
I could just set the partition and dostype from HDToolBox like with the 
original install? Hmm...

Arlo T. Moran
atmoran@oakland.edu

PS when I did the system recompile, 2 files failed: /usr/bin/lex due to 
flex making a file with bad chars, and /usr/sbin/r??.bootparamd due to 
something else creating a bad file... does this sound familiar to 
anyone?  Probably not, since everyone here probably is wise to sup by now ;)
This was using the files in src/tar_files as of last week.