On Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 04:03:56AM +0000, Glenn Becker wrote:
> 
> I installed NetBSD 3.0 from floppies which worked like a charm but when I 
> rebooted the bootloader refused to boot Debian or Slackware (it spit out 
> an "error 3").

There isn't much of a check there, just that the first byte of the mbr
partition isn't 0, and that the last two are aa55.
hexdump -C -n512 /dev/rdw0? will dump out the pbr.

You may need to have grub installed in the pbr to load these systems.
Grub is much more akin to NetBSD's /boot program than the mbr bootselect
stuff.

> I booted into Debian and installed GRUB, which 
> auto-detected everything except NetBSD. Sure enough, NetBSD would not boot 
> when I added an entry for it to the GRUB menu, utilizing the chainloader 
> option.

That should work, you must have the parameters for grub incorrect.
 
> I've seen some indication that NetBSD will not boot if it is on a 
> non-primary partition. Is this the case (got contradictory info when I 
> STFW)?

The boot floppies installed it there, and it booted - so it must work!
The documentation you found is out of date.


	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk