>   I now have a situation where there are some people would like to put
>up a NetBSD partition.  It seems it would be quick to put up a partition
>by running a dos program which would shrink the check to ask how many
>cylinders or MB the dos partion should become, check to see if it would
>be possible, move necessary files, update any bitmaps and finally update
>the partition table.
>    Anyone know of such a program?

Yup, there's one called "fips".  You should be able to get it from any
site containing the simtel archives (look for "fips11.zip", or something
similar).  I used it a little while back to install NetBSD on a friend's
MS-DOS only drive.

Some caveats when using this program:

You need to defrag the MS-DOS partition; fips will only partition a free
segment of your disk; it doesn't move files itself.

After I had used fips, the MS-DOS partition block offset and size were fine,
but the start/end cyl/sec/head addreses were bogus; as a consequence, the
partition wouldn't boot (but if you booted off of a floppy, you could tell
it to boot of wd0 and it would work).  You might need to correct them to get
it to boot correctly.  My suggestion is to use the NetBSD fdisk to do that.
You'll probably want to make a boot floppy with a few basic utils on it.

--Ken