Thanks to Michael Pins and Tim Carlson for prompt replies.

Best bet is that the drive is no good. I called SunService on the

warranty, and they volunteered that the disk shouldn't be behaving like

that and are shipping a replacement.

Original:

>Solaris 2.5.1 HW 4/97, Ultra 170

>

>We bought a new 4.2G disk from Sun in one of their external cabinets,

>hooked it up, did boot -r. Device files are present, format sees the

>disk but refuses to format it (or write a partition table, or label it).

>

>I am clueless. A reduced version of a format session follows.

>

>Has anyone seen this before? Will summarize.

>