Checking the cabling sounds good. It might also be a problem with the
SRAM buffers on the motherboard `TC' card on the 5000/200.

If this doesn't go away after reseating (or preferably replacing) the
cables and checking the termination, I'd try reads and writes
(nondestructively!)  to the SCSI string on a separate controller, if
at all possible.


>> BTW can I use any new SCSI disk or are there any limitations?
>
>Up until last weekend, I would have said yes.  However, DEC have retired
>the RZ25L, and work just bought half a dozen RZ25M's.  Not one of these
>works in three different 5000/150's that we tried.  (By "not working",
>a `cnfg 3' wedged during the SCSI probe and an Ultrix diskless client
>swapping on disk got to the "swap on local disk" bit then hung.)

This is clearly not NetBSD's fault.  If the drive wedges the PROM, it
will wedge the PROM for Ultrix, too.

Could it be a spinup botch in the drive firmware?  Maybe if you change
the drive jumper and/or modepage to spinup on power-on it will work.

>_Most_ disks should work, but don't count on it...

Uh, ``what he said''.  

I think we've been careful to make sure NetBSD will properly handle
and boot from (and get the geometry right on) a wide range of drives,
including some old pre-SCSI-2 CCS monsters.