Hi there,

I experienced the same problem with a RaQ2 and NetBSD 1.5.2. Afters
hours of getting in trouble again and again, I decided to put the Cobalt
HD into my Linux box. I flushed the first sectors of the disk with dd
and created (with Linux fdisk) a 50 MB Linux userland partition, and a
second partition for NetBSD, covering the rest of the disk. After that,
I formatted the first partition unter Linux (with "-r 0 -O none", like
in the FAQ - the arguments mean the same under Linux), leaving the
NetBSD slice alone.

After putting the disk back into the RaQ2, I netbooted NetBSD. I could
successfully mount my ext2 partition (/dev/wd0e) to /altroot, but I had
the same effect: Putting files on it worked, creating directories failed
with panic (exactly the same message as Adam got).

That way, I pulled the HD back into my Linux box, did mkfs on the ext2
partition again, and created the "boot" directory under Linux. No
problem.

Back in the RaQ2, I was able to mount /dev/wd0e, and I could see the
boot directory. I even was able to put a compressed kernel on it.
However, the RaQ2 doesn't boot from the hard disk (serial cable
connected, but absolutely no messages), and if I try to create further
directories, the same panic happens again.

I checked the FAQ and the NetBSD guide as well as the list archive, but
Adam's posting is the only thing I found with this issue. The funny
thing is that the RaQ2 worked happily with NetBSD when I just followed
the FAQ step by step (just re-using existing partitions). The thing is
that 500 MB for the first partition is ways too oversized just for a
kernel, and that the former /var partition is unused in that setup (I
didn't need it for backups) - I just wanted to make things cleaner, with
a small ext2 partition and a single big NetBSD slice.

Unfortunately, my network card isn't supported by the Cobalt OS Restore
CD, that way I don't have a chance to get the original partitioning
back... :(

Any help is highly appreciated. Thank you!

Jonas