Just some more rambling:
IRQ and DMA are OK, (10 and 5? Anyway the ones that work).
And they are reserved in bios (this is NetBSD-1.4.2).

Anyway, yesterday I got to test my backups from an Archive
Python 25501 DAT (memo to self: don't remove the DAT before
shutting down the system). I lost /dev/sd2a (/usr/pkg) but
I had taken dumps of the fs a couple of days ago.

I started by booting into single-user, newfs and then restore.
Restore seemed to go fine until:
panic: dup ialloc <blaablaa>
lockmgr(): locking against myself.

Single-user, newfs, fsck. Again restore seemed to go well until
it got to setting owner and other information for directories:
panic: freeing free inode

I think I will give -current a try..
-- 
Jarkko Teppo
jate@uwasa.fi