Excerpts from netbsd: 17-Sep-97 Re: I386 booting oddness Michael
Graff@flame.org (1007)

> but I did
> get the IDE to boot by setting up a BIOS partition table and making
> the only partition in there be NetBSD.

Did you start the NetBSD partition at sector 0 or did you
reserve the first track for a generic bootsector?

(If the latter, it would be one more argument to make this
the standard installation.)

> The Award BIOS I now have even configures devices on the other side of
> PCI bridges.  Pretty cool.

This is "basic functionality". Every BIOS which doesn't do it
is broken.

best regards
Matthias