Having applied both patches posted to port-alpha within the last month
for the ncr driver, I still don't appear to be much closer to making
the ncr driver work.  On one occasion, out of many, I've had it boot
up and been able to label/newfs the disk.  Something Charles noticed
was that the drive didn't appear to be handling LUN's at all well, so
in the face of there being no QUIRK_NOLUN, I #define'd MAX_LUN to be
1 for ncr.c which resulted in less crap messages at boot.  This hasn't
helped make the disk useful as these messages still result:

sd0(ncr0:0:0): extraneous data discarded.
sd0(ncr0:0:0): COMMAND FAILED (9 80) @0xfffffe0000061400.

(appears 6 times if I try to "fsck /dev/rsd0a")

Setting ncr_debug to 0xffff, I see the following:

# disklabel sd0
sd0(ncr0:0:0): CMD=0 F=1d0 A=0x0 L=0 ncr0: queuepos=27 tryoffset=520.
Q[F CCB=400 STAT=4/0
]
sd0(ncr0:0:0): CMD=1b F=1b0 A=0x0 L=0 ncr0: queuepos=28 tryoffset=540.
Q[F CCB=400 STAT=4/0
]
sd0(ncr0:0:0): CMD=1e F=190 A=0x0 L=0 ncr0: queuepos=29 tryoffset=560.
Q[F CCB=400 STAT=4/80
sd0(ncr0:0:0): extraneous data discarded.
sd0(ncr0:0:0): COMMAND FAILED (9 80) @0xfffffe0000061400.
]
sd0(ncr0:0:0): CMD=1e F=190 A=0x0 L=0 ncr0: queuepos=30 tryoffset=580.
Q[F CCB=400 STAT=4/80
sd0(ncr0:0:0): extraneous data discarded.
sd0(ncr0:0:0): COMMAND FAILED (9 80) @0xfffffe0000061400.
]
sd0(ncr0:0:0): CMD=1e F=190 A=0x0 L=0 ncr0: queuepos=31 tryoffset=600.
Q[F CCB=400 STAT=4/80
sd0(ncr0:0:0): extraneous data discarded.
sd0(ncr0:0:0): COMMAND FAILED (9 80) @0xfffffe0000061400.
]
sd0(ncr0:0:0): CMD=1e F=190 A=0x0 L=0 ncr0: queuepos=32 tryoffset=620.
Q[F CCB=400 STAT=4/80
sd0(ncr0:0:0): extraneous data discarded.
sd0(ncr0:0:0): COMMAND FAILED (9 80) @0xfffffe0000061400.
]
sd0(ncr0:0:0): CMD=1e F=190 A=0x0 L=0 ncr0: queuepos=33 tryoffset=640.
Q[F CCB=400 STAT=4/80
sd0(ncr0:0:0): extraneous data discarded.
sd0(ncr0:0:0): COMMAND FAILED (9 80) @0xfffffe0000061400.
]
sd0(ncr0:0:0): CMD=1e F=190 A=0x0 L=0 ncr0: queuepos=34 tryoffset=660.
Q[F CCB=400 STAT=4/80
sd0(ncr0:0:0): extraneous data discarded.
sd0(ncr0:0:0): COMMAND FAILED (9 80) @0xfffffe0000061400.
]
disklabel: /dev/rsd0c: Input/output error
#

Are there any other patches floating around for the NCR driver which
haven't been committed that I could try ?

Oh, the drive in question probes as:
sd0 at scsibus0 targ 0 lun 0: <FUJITSU, M2909S-512, 0134> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd0(ncr0:0:0): 10.0 MB/s (100 ns, offset 8)
sd0: 2956MB, 3138 cyl, 19 head, 101 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 6054834 sectors

Darren