Justin T. Gibbs writes:
> >
> >Are there maybe updates to aic7xxx.c since the 3.0-970209-SNAP?
> 
> That is an ancient version of the driver.  In truth, the FreeBSD version
> of the driver has been unstable until very recently.  That was the reason
> I put off the port to NetBSD.  You should try installing the latest 2.2
> snapshot from ftp://releng22.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/.

I was unable to reach releng22.FreeBSD.org (or any other thing in
freebsd.org - DNS was refusing to recognize them for awhile; now I can
get the address of releng22, but can't ping it), so I installed
2.2.1-RELEASE from ftp.cdrom.com and tried newfs, the problem
persisted. Here's the revision of aic7xxx.c that's in 2.2.1:

 *      $Id: aic7xxx.c,v 1.81.2.17 1997/03/24 19:17:33 gibbs Exp $

Is this as new as what's on releng22.freebsd.org (which I currently
can't get)?

> >Here's the messages printed by FreeBSD 3.0:
> >
> >    sd0: timed out in dataout phase, SCSISIGI == 0x4
> >    SEQADDR == 0x5e
> 
> Known, and I believe fixed, bugs.

In this case, (unless the driver on releng22 is newer) it may be due to
cables. The disks are in an external box (I should probably be flogged
for not saying that before), and removing any two sections of cable
caused it to work fine with any of the OSes (NetBSD-1.2.1, FreeBSD
3.0-current, or FreeBSD-2.2.1).

We're now trying to figure out how to recable so things are still
modular, but also work.

Thanks to everyone for all the great info. I shudder to think how this
would have proceeded if I'd been using a commercial OS...

By the way, if you need any lackey work done to port the latest ahc
driver to NetBSD, I'd be happy to do anything I can (as a matter of
fact, if somebody can give me a "FreeBSD->NetBSD network driver cheat
sheet", I'd like to port the fxp Intel ethernet driver to NetBSD 1.2.1 -
this new motherboard has one of those too, and I'd like to see how it
compares to the SMC/DEC cards we're using now; if someone else has
already done it, that's even better ;-)).