> 
> 
> I had similar problems with mtools when I first installed it.

Mtools are working just fine now.
I had the same error with the package from ftp.netbsd.org, because
I did NOT installed the binaries over the old binaries, which were broken.
Then I just launched mcopy from this tmp dir, but mcopy is only a
frontend to mwrite and mread. And in this case the wrong mwrite was
executed. 

> The soft errors you mentioned were - at least on my system - not
> related to netbsd, nor to mtools but to the settings of my mainboard
> asus sp3g, where the default setting of ISA-GAT-MODE was 'enabled'.
> Disabling that made these timeouts go away... (ISA GAT MODE means
> Guaranteed Access Time on the ISA bus, which is totally weird and
> not used by any ISA device I know...)

My mainboard does not have such an option in the BIOS settings. 
I think that  with mtools I have less timeouts now as if I'll mount
the disk with mount... 

I can remember that as I just boot the install floppies without the
NCR-SCSI board installed, everything works fine. 
But after I installed the NCR-SCSI board, and boot the install floppies again,
I get this FD0 timeouts.

Markus