Well I now have 1.2c partially on the machine and I can boot off the hard 
disk.

After much gyration and retesting of every step I reformatted the rd54
yet again. Then used 1.2G-rx33 to edlabel it.  As that was a successful 
rx33 even if the miniroot disks were useless.  With that boot/edlable/copy
I used it to copy the 1.2c-tk50 that I have.  Next step was to force ra0b 
read/write.  This took many tries but it finally did it, why I have no clue. 
Then I had to dd the raboot and then I could disklabel the boot blocks.  I 
was also able to now newfs all of my partitions.  

The next step is to copy the *.tar.gz files off the tape and put them in the 
right places. The howto and faq seems to have left this as an exercize to 
those that are experts and know unix well.  HELP!

At this point I've been awake 22 hours and the brain is very unhappy.  I 
have advanced myself far enough to see the system build process go futher 
than before.  Time for bed.


Allison