Thus spake Curt Sampson ("CS> ") sometime Tomorrow...
[ahhh, pine's future mail syndrome strikes again.]

CS> The first stage bootstrap bootxx_ffsv1 seems to be working fine now
CS> (as opposed to rebooting the machine), except that it says "Can't find
CS> /boot". This could, potentially be because this is a USB mass storage
CS> device instead of a hard disk, but I'm not about to try it on my hard
CS> disk because it would render my home system unbootable. (The floppy
CS> first-stage boot strap still causes the machine to reboot.)

FWIW, I'm encountering something of a different, yet similar, problem.
BIOS:USB-HDD doesn't pick it up, but BIOS:USB-ZIP does.

Unfortunately, it hangs right after "Updating ESCD" until I unplug the drive,
after which point it continues and boots happily from the hd.

[http://www.starwolf.com/machines/dmesg.rivendell for all available
 information at boot time.   The board in question is an IWill KK266+,
 for the AMD (read: lots of VIA chips, most of which don't give me any
 grief).]

On the plus side, I will note that I finally got the system to recognize
hot-plug on the thing.  YAY!

CS> Unfortunately, I have the machine, but not the patience to tweak the
CS> bootstrap code. (Nor the knowledge, really, or at least I don't want
CS> to regain it. :-)) I'm happy to try out new binaries from others, and
CS> I'd go so far as to set up a serial console so all the messages would
CS> be captured, if someone feels up to tweaking the code and sending me
CS> binaries. I'd say it's critical we solve this before the 2.0 release,
CS> but there's a fair amount of time before that, I think.

I'm in the same boat:  I have the machine, I have the bootstrap code,
but I have not the knowledge nor, at the immediate moment, a good chunk
of time to dedicate to it.

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: If you look through Windows