I discovered that a GENERIC kernel would always somehow leap to the
conclusion that root and swap were on sd1{a,b}, which was not right.
In fact, sd1 wasn't configured.  I tried setting the kernel to configure
only the disk I have, as sd0, (no sd* configure), and it *still* couldn't
find the root device, so I removed options GENERIC and configured netbsd
on sd0a; this works, but seems overkill.

-s