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There are some situations in which there are problems. Here is a short list which might help you in your disk drive quest:
Most SCSI disk drives will work without modifying /etc/disktab.
There are problems with the installation of boot blocks and badly formed fstab generated by BuildDisk of NEXTSTEP 2.0. A disk connected to the NeXT will need to have a NeXT specific label written to it before it can be properly recognized by the system. If you get an error message "Invalid Label..." this indicates that the drive was successfully seen by the NeXT machine but it does not have the proper label, to install a label use the /usr/etc/disk program on the raw disk device that the system assigned to the device and use the label command to write the label onto the disk. [how the NeXT assigns disk devices is explained in the N&SA manual]
NEXTSTEP releases 2.0 and up provide a low level disk formatter, sdform, which does not offer much flexibility, but gets the job done. Most drives are already formatted at the factory. You might look for the utility sdformat on the FTP sites as well, which overcomes some problems of sdform supplied by NeXT.