Installing 8.1 on a Beige G3

[fixerb@national.shitposting.agency]

Hi,

I've been fighting with my beige G3 for a few days now, trying to 
install NetBSD 8.1.
I've been following the INSTALL notes and the Fabrice Delambre post and 
after some config tweaking I got the thing to netboot.
In the post it said that I should go with the install and expect 
segfaults after installing sets, having devices created etc, but for 
some reason I can't get past the disk formatting stage.
Right after running the install, sysinst detects the IDE disk as wd0, 
but after that I get some device timeout readings and "soft errors" 
corrected.
I don't change anything in the geometry, just going with the defaults 
and then when sysinst runs disklabel, it stops after a while throwing 
this error:
"disklabel: ioctl DIOCWDINFO: Label magic number or checksum is wrong!". 
Exiting that segfaults sysinst and returns to the (now broken) shell.
I tried doing some manual partitioning with pdisk and every time I run 
it, I get errors about the BSD disklabel not existing (fair enough), bad 
data in some block on a disk and sometimes even a downpour of "read 
failed" errors. Any partitioning work doesn't seem to have any effect.
All of that pretty much screams hardware issue, but the thing is, I 
can't find the cause. I swapped disks - same. I imaged the OG disk on 
another machine - no problems there. I booted into MacOS 9 still 
installed on the OG disk and dumped some stuff on it just to test 
read&write - no problems there as well.

So yeah, I definitely need some help with this thing and the 
installation.
Is there something I'm missing or I forgot to check it?