Background: we have a failing machine, that needs to be swapped out 
right away.  We went to BestBuy and purchased the lowest-end machine 
in stock (a strategy that has always worked very well for us in the 
10 years we've been using NetBSD):  Amd Athlon64 3300+ (2.2GHz), 
512MB DDR, 512KB L2.

For various reasons, we want to run an i386 kernel on this 
box.  However, both 1.6.1 and 2.1 install kernels fail with:

"kbc: cmd word write error"

and later

"no /dev/console"

and when menu comes up to choose what to install, etc., keyboard is 
no-op and we're dead.

It boots the supplied WinXP from HD fine and keyboard works fine.  We 
therefore do not suspect the hardware is busted.

We don't have a dmesg output -- can't write that fast, and there's no 
great way to get the output to a file without a keyboard.

The keyboard is PS/2.

A quick google search on:

site:mail-index.netbsd.org netbsd "kbc: cmd word write error"

or

http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:mail-index.netbsd.org+netbsd+%22kbc:+cmd+word+write+error%22&hl=en&lr=&filter=0

yielded the conclusion that (a) others have seen it (b) nobody has 
published a  fix for it (which is not to say that a fix doesn't exist).

We found another machine (stole it from somebody's desk), installed 
things and so our fire is out, but ... we would like to work out what 
is going on.

We have not yet downloaded and tried the amd64 install CD for 2.1, 
and we'll do that next.

We can help debug the problem, but thought we'd ask first if this was 
already known?

Best regards,
--Terry

tmm@mcci.com    tel: +1-607-277-1029    fax: +1-607-277-6844    www.mcci.com