It looks like your Maxtor drives are SCSI, if this is the case you could
low level format them by connecting them up to a PC with most any Adaptec
SCSI controller and running the low level format.  I have a Sun 3/150 and
have had to do that from time to time between botched installs.  

Rick 


At 01:05 PM 10/5/98 -0400, Robert D. Keys wrote:
>> Chris,
>> 	There are two things that will make the PROMs unhappy with
>> a disklabel:
>> 
>> 1. wrong "magic" number (literally, it looks in a specific place
>> in the label for a particular number to know that the disk has been
>> formatted/partitioned and that the rest of the data read from where
>> the label is supposed to be is likely to be valid).
>> 
>> 2. one or more partitions which are not whole cylinders in size.
>
>When I was installing on my Sun 3/110 machine, I totally botched 3 Maxtor
>drives by getting wrong info somewhere on the drives.
>
>Is there any way to recover the drives by reformatting/labelling them
>using some other machine (dos box maybe) or SunOS 4.1.1?
>
>The drives I nuked are a pair of XT-4380S and one P1-17S Panther.
>
>On some other Conner CP3100 drives, I had to set byte 2 of the formatting
>table to a value of 0xbf to get it to take subsequent formatting using
>a dos box and a Future Domain TMD-850M controller.  Is that that ``magic
>number''?
>
>Suggestions????
>
>Thanks
>
>Bob Keys
>
>