Now that I've made a boot tape, I can't seem to partition a hard disk on a
Sun 3/50 in preparation for loading the operating system.

This unit, like most diskful 3/50's of this vintage, has a "shoebox" with
an Emulex bridge board and full-height ESDI drive. The original drive was
a Micropolis 1355, but I swapped in a working Maxtor EXT-4380
(a soft-sectored ESDI drive that's been used with success on other Sun 3's)
and saved the old one in the event the install didn't work. 

When the install tape loaded, I saw (among other messages):

si(0:0:0)-25,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0-
sd0(si0:0:0) not ready, data= 00 00 00 00 22 00 00 00 00 00
si0 targ 0 lun 1: <EMULEX, MD21/S2     ESDI, A00> SCSI0 0/direct fixed

When I ran edlabel, I immediately got the messages:

ncr5380_command: short transfer: wanted 10 got 6.
si(0:0:0)-25,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0- 
sd0(si0:0:0):not ready, data = 00 00 00 00 22 00 00 00 00 00
ncr5380_command: short transfer: wanted 10 got 6.
si(0:0:0)-28,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0- 
sd0(si0:0:0):not ready, data = 00 00 00 00 22 00 08 00 00 00
sd0: disk label read error
bad sect/trk, set to 1

The "wanted 10 got 6" message recurred when I tried to write a
label/partition table.

Is the Sun3 RAM disk minikernel able to handle a hard disk that was not
previously used on a Sun? Can it instruct the Emulex bridge board to do a
low-level format on the drive? (The EXT-4380 is soft-sectored, so the
Emulex may want to low-level format it in a particular way. But I can't
seem to find a command that will do this.)

Help?

--Brett Glass