> > The motherboard for our little experiment INSISTS on IDing the IDE drive
> > and then tries to boot from it.  Since the sd0 is no longer the primary,
> > the old boot code remained unfound.
> 
> I am told (but have not checked) that the canonical way to deal with
> this is to disable the controller in the BIOS but leave it in the
> kernel -- that way the kernel will boot of off sd, but it will probe
> wd successfully...

This works fine for me.  (Although it sounds a bit kludgy :-)

  -jm