I recently aquired an old 486 system with a Quantum 270A IDE disk.

I tried putting NetBSD on it using the boot floppy 1.2G. It failed during
the population with bootstrapping binaries.

I saw a panic message and the system rebooted.

I have put the disk in another system with a GENERIC 1.2G kernel. (and the bootstrapping binaries) 

There it shows the same behavior. The GENERIC kernel does not reboot immediately 
after the panic so I could write it down,
the panic reads: 
mode = 020640 inum=3328 fs=<mountpoint of the disk>

panic: ffs_valloc: dupalloc

I can disklabel the disk, newfs it, write kernels to it but _not_ untar anything on it. (or copy multiple files)

I do not completely understand the code that produces the panic so I am posting
a question here. Does anybody know if this is just a broken disk (ony
to be used for Windows) or is there a bug in the code?

I checked for faulty hardware the system, add-on cards and the cabling.

One interesting thing I found was that the (bootstrapping version) of disklabel -i claims the disk has only 800 cycles instead of 944, it reports the right
number of heads and sectors  (14 and 40).
(Right as defined as; according to the boot message and the manufacterer datasheet)


Paul Sijben                 University of Twente, The Netherlands    
tel.: +31-53-4893735        http://www.huygens.org/~sijben/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"You know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species  
while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?"
	            Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman - Good Omens