All right, on my own I figured out _my_ problem: corrupted
(or, rather, interrupted) download of initrd.bin.
It would have been much better if md5sums file was also present... And my guess is that at least some of the problems
that people are reporting stem from this \"issue\".
Btw, it made no difference of what version of eraseall to use -
looking at the source it does not do anything special with bad
blocks - just if some error occurs on erasing some 16k block
it reports an error and proceeds with erasing the next 16k block.
Also, attempting to start opie-sh howto results in error - inability to find the howto itself. Is it supposed to be this way (i.e. if this is a known issue) ?
Thanks,
Alex Y.