Ok all you brave NetBSDers!
For those who are not faint of heart, here is what I have done.

With my pretty stable 1.2G, 13MB, RD54 sys, I put my target RD54
on to the system.  I had used 1.2G disklabel to create my rd54b disk
label (being an aberant personality, I use a, b, c, and f as my partitions).
I mounted the target drive 'a' partition as /mnt and the 'f' partition as
/mnt/usr (had to mkdir that in mnt after mount "a").
I did a newfs on the target drive, for each partition.

Then: I put myself in the root dir on ra0,
told the beasty to"
cp -R ./* /mnt
It takes a little while but it is faster (to me) than the tar.gz efforts.
I have done this 3 times, and created 3 drives (one of them twice cause I
newfs'd the wrong drive!).

Then I did my edits, host, networks, etc.

then booted my machine off the new drive.  

Thanks everyone, escpecially, Rick, ragge, Brian, Gunnar, and everyone I
forget to name!

This is gonna be great - NetBSD on old vaxen, Linux on old vaen, 
home user licenses for VMS on old vaxen!  All those folks who have
gotten aggravated with DEC and wanted to give away or dump old
vaxen can give them us old iron crew!!
Thanks everyone!
bad bob