Trying to find room to unpack the kernel source, I've cleared another
little partition (16mb), and reformatted a couple of zips.

Both the root & swap are on sd1.  The new little partition is on sd0.
I've tried mkfs both with its own values, and with my guesses from what
sort of works on the zip, as well as both slice 0 and slice 2.  Every
combination gives me a partition that i can mount, reports clean to fsck
and fsck_ffs, mounts, then crashes the system into the debugger over df.

I also got the bright side to get at the rest of the space on a zip.  It
creates the same problems, save that it also reports "illegal request"
and a string of hex codes starting with "FF".  I was also unable to get
a usable system with the first set of values in the zip howto ( i don't
remember what finally worked last time).  However, i have tried to
create a larger file system, in spite of the note--the hwoeto claims
145230 as maximum root partition size.  is this correct?

ANd if this weren't enough, on both teh piecemeal version of the system
(ksrc12.aa . . .) and sys.tar.gz, after unpacking several tens of
megabytes, tar reports a corruption error. :(  I've gotten the piecemeal
files from the mirror here (/afs/iastate.edu/public/ftp/pub/netbsd
/NetBSD-1.2/source/ksrc/*, while i obtained the sys.tar.gz from
ftp.netbsd.org. 

rick