> > syncing the disks fully.  Is the full procedure you describe really
> > necessary?  In other words, I think that the following should accomplish
> > the same thing:
> > 
> > 1) 'shutdown now' to go single user
> > 2) 'sync'
> > 3) 'umount -a'  (although I want to say this may not get the root
> > device...I'll have to read the man page to be sure).
> 
> I didn't think that would work for root, since it has to be remounted
> read-only...
> 
> > 4) 'shutdown -h now'
> > 
> > How does that work?
> 
> That works fine.  I wasn't aware of umount -a working for the root fs.
> Actually, I've thought of one more factor... as far back as I can
> remember, I've had problems when using shutdown -r now.  I don't recall
> whether shutdown -h now causes the problem or not, now that I think about
> it -- which makes sense, since -r does reboot, while -h basically
> approximates "it is now safe to shut of your macintosh"....
> 
> I'm trying a shutdown -h now from multi-user, rebooting from its prompt,
> booting NetBSD....  No problems whatsoever....  Therefore, it seems to
> only happen with a shutdown -r now....

Does your drive go into some sort of sleep mode automatically? It could be
that the on-disk cache is getting the sectors to write but not getting to
send them out before MacOS resets the SCSI bus (and possably the drive).

Take care,

Bill