In short: sysinst seems to get the disk size wrong, and then fails to newfs.

This disk:

sd1 at scsibus0 target 2 lun 0: <IBM, DNES-309170W, SAH0> SCSI3 0/direct fixed
sd1: 8748 MB, 11474 cyl, 5 head, 312 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 17916240 sectors

produces this disklabel:

...
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 320
tracks/cylinder: 5
sectors/cylinder: 1600
cylinders: 11474
total sectors: 18358400
...

8 partitions:
#        size   offset     fstype   [fsize bsize   cpg]
  a:   409600        0     4.2BSD     1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.    0 - 255)
  b:  1043200   409600       swap                        # (Cyl.  256 - 907)
  c: 18358400        0     unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 11473)
  d: 16905600  1452800     4.2BSD     1024  8192     0   # (Cyl.  908 - 11473)


This isn't the default layout, but the size of partition d was
calculated by sysinst (by giving a too large value for the size). I
guess this is because it thinks that the disk has more sectors than it
does.

I've seen this on two quite different machines, this Miata and an old
3000/400.

/Johan