David Laight wrote:

>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The documentation you found is out of date.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
>
>  
>
Two quick suggestions:

You can use Puppy Linux (www.goosee.com/puppy), running in RAM, to 
install grub in the MBR and the grub files into any of the Linux 
partitions - for some reason the Puppy version of Grub detects NetBSD 
(whereas other versions don't) and allows you to chain load NetBSD 
(although I haven't tried w/NetBSD on an extended partition.) Puppy has 
a nice, simple Grub loader configuration.

You could also reinstall the boot loader from Windows XP and use 
bootpart (see http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm), although this works 
better in a multiple HDD situation.