Ok, here's what happens when I boot the 300G disk after it fails halfway thorough 1.10 installation.

The superblock of the boot partition is "unable to be read". It could be because of a corrupted partition, corrupted partition table, or the partition being out of the readable range. From my last tests, I think the partition table and partitions are ok, but I'm going to double check.

BTW, what does "hit control-a to enter pump" mean?

Full log attached for those interested.

-------------------
NetWinder Floating Point Emulator V0.95 (c) 1998-1999 Rebel.com
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
empeg-pump v0.04 (20001108)
Press Ctrl-A to enter pump...EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
upgrade triggered
VFS: Disk change detected on device sr(11,0)
Mounting CD: No medium foVFS: Disk change detected on device sr(11,0)
und
VFS: Disk change detected on device sr(11,0)
ejecting cd