Sorry for answering my own post but at least this information will
appear in the archives.

I found a little button under the ethernet adaptor which will halt the
machine - so I can now instruct the machine to boot.

Now my next problem - having trouble successfully doing newfs on rz56s.

I down loaded the two netboot files from 1.5_ALPHA2,  It appears that the
mopboot is the same as it has the same date.  The netbsd.ram file seems
different since it does not crash like the 1.5_ALPHA did (only tried
once).

The system boots and seems relatively happy.
It is a vaxstation 3100 with 32MB of memory and 2 rz56 6xxMB drives.
It starts sysinst.

When it tells you it found disks sd0 and sd1 it also has some message
in the middle of the screen which states d0 no disklabel and d1 no
disklabel.  The messages appear like they were not formatted properly
so I assume they really indicate sd0 and sd1 have no label.

After you get thru the partition table information and after you give the
final yes you see something flash twice on the screen (with a finished
at the top).  Next you see the normal superblock backups as it does fsck.

However after it has written out all the back up superblocks I get:
write error: 0
wtfs: read only file system

and at the top: newfs failed.

If I get out to the shell and attempt to do a 
disklabel -r -w sd0 mydisk
I get a message which states no disklabel.
However following that if I do a
disklabel -r sd0 
it seems there is a disk label there and it looks ok.

If I do a newfs on /dev/rsd0a I again see the boot blocks written out
but problems after the book blocks are written with the same complaint:
wtfs: read only file system

If I change the first partition to have an offset of at least one cylinder
I get a different message
cg 0: bad magic number

A brief look at the rest of the system seems ok - I can ping the machine
when sysinst is running.

Has anyone else had problems with the disk driver for the vaxstation 3100s
and rz56s?

johnh...