Hi,

>>  You shouldn't do that, since you need the programs that are in /usr.
>
> Yeah, I kind of remembered that. Actually, I keep hoping that sysinst is 
> somehow supposed to dodge that bullet. I guess not?

sysinst mounts new filesystems under /mnt.

> BTW, if I didn't mount them, sysinst didn't seem to think they needed to 
> be newfs-ed. At least, it stopped to tell me the results of the newfs 
> when I mounted them all first and didn't tell me about it when I didn't. 
> I'm not sure it mattered where I mounted them, however.

Not sure I understand this. You generally newfs, then mount, unless you're 
using preexisting slices.

>> Use the /mnt mountpoint, and mount /mnt/usr there, and untargzip to that.
>
> untargzip? tar -zxf what?

> Is there a tarball that contains the contents of /usr? Or is the idea to pipe 
> tar to tar instead of using cp -p?

When I'm installing manually, after I've got the partition table all set 
up, I newfs, mount under /mnt, /mnt/usr, et cetera, then mkdir 
/mnt/install/, ftp all of the sets to that directory, then, in /mnt, do:
for file in install/*.tgz
do
tar xzpf $file
done

Then,
cd /mnt/dev ; ./MAKEDEV all

Many of the sets put stuff in usr, so there's no set that just has usr.

> The timeout errors look something like this I copied by hand to the list back 
> in May:
>
>>     sd0(esp0:0:0:0) esp0: timed out [ecb 0x104b000 (flags 0x1, dleft 10000, 
>> stat 0)] <state 5, nexus 0x104b000, phase (l 3, c 0, p 0), resid 10000, msg 
>> (q 0, o 0) DMA active> AGAIN
>>     sd0(esp0:0:0:0) esp0: timed out [ecb 0x104b000 (flags 0x41, dleft 
>> 10000, stat 0)] <state 5, nexus 0x104b000, phase (l 3, c 0, p 0), resid 
>> 10000, msg (q 20, o 0) DMA active> AGAIN
>>     cd0: async, 8-bit transfers
>>     sd0: waiting for pack to spin up ...

Have you tried playing with termination? A different drive?

> Wish I had more time to give this. But what I really wish is that I could 
> afford a full 68040 to plug into this beast.

What kind of machine is this?

> I should mention again that I have reason to believe the box has hardware 
> problems. In Mac OS, Netscape tends to bomb a lot, CodeWarrior tends to trip 
> out in mid-compile sometimes, that kind of stuff.

A different drive might help.

John