SysV/88 installation

[Michael Kraemer]

Hello group,
(does anybody hear me at all?)

I have this Motorola Delta 900 machine which still
seems to be functional, and a SysV/88k installation (?) tape.
Now I'm trying a fresh install, from the 187bug> menu
(bo 0 50).
The box starts to boot from tape, but then stops with sth like:

install-it: no suitable disk

which, IMHO, is an outright lie, since
IOI shows the disk is there (as are the DAT and the QIC drive),
and I have swapped the original disk with a new one, to no avail.
I went into the proposed maintenance mode and
following the suggestions I could at least generate the special
files for the disk. But the damn box refuses to install,
it just reboots from scratch (which takes awfully long,
due to the gazillions of hardware tests).

any advice out there ?
TIA,
MK